President Obama’s semi-amnesty measure has provoked lots of response. Matt Yglesias and Jim Pethokoukis, to name a couple, argue that when immigrants gain jobs, US natives gain jobs too. The labor they provide complements jobs for US natives.
One example used by Yglesias is the restaurant kitchen where largely Latino staff makes it possible for waiters, bartenders, sommeliers, and restauranteurs to have jobs. Pethokoukis cites research from his own American Enterprise Institute which finds that for every 100 H-2B (lower-skilled, non-agriculture work) jobs added, 464 US natives gain jobs. The argument is that US natives won’t do work such as home building which means that home builders and their higher-level support staff won’t have jobs either. But, as usual, this is an issue with the question “at what price?” attached to it. Americans would be willing to work these jobs if wages weren’t tamped down by an influx of immigrant labor supply. But businesses want to have lower overhead and labor costs in order to capture a bigger portion of consumers’ pocketbooks. Perhaps this is the problem.
The two big industries in question – food service and home-building/construction: we are now experiencing hangovers in both of these industries. And these hangovers are in part fueled by very low wages. As a nation, we consumed too much housing and we’re consuming too much food. What we need in both cases is not lower prices. We could stand higher prices, and it would be to our benefit.
At CNN, a restauranteur from Oxford, Mississippi, weighs in on immigrations’ impact on his industry:
I can not survive without the Latino segment of the workforce in Oxford, Mississippi. I employ a tremendous number of people who do extremely unglamorous work. We pay them well and take care of them as well as we can. I have trouble getting American-born workers to even apply for those positions when we advertise, much less show up.
The restauranteur assumes that his business is worth keeping alive. As if we don’t have enough restaurants as it is. His argument would probably be “well, consumers want more restaurants”. But I’d respond that they want more restaurants when cost structure is low versus when cost structure is high. But just looking at the physical frames of the American public, we don’t *need* more restaurants. Not all restaurants would go away if prices rose across the board. Some would fall off and this would allow American consumers to either spend money on other goods or perhaps to save.
And entrepreneurial restauranteurs are generally smart people. When the business becomes arbitrarily marginally viable, it sucks entrepreneurs from other industry. These businesses that otherwise wouldn’t be profitable without labor supply shocks become profitable and we get “too many” of them.
Like this:
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Immigration is the reserve army of capital, and the left’s support of increasing the importation of unskilled, low-wage workers shows the degree to which it has become a tool of neoliberalism.
Exactly. I have a an ongoing argument with a friend of mine that claims that we benefit from illegal immigration because of lower prices. This is obviously (to me anyways) incorrect. The seller of a home (or any product) is not going to say, “You know, I built this house for pennies thanks to all the illegal mexicans that I used to build it, so I’m going to do the buyers a solid and knock 30% off the price!” The price of a product is whatever the market can support, and the same is true whether we are talking homes, or restaurant meals, or ipods. The seller wants to maximize his profits, that’s the point. The mythological benefits of free trade and immigation are entirely invented by corporations.
There is no ‘n’ in restaurateur.
Hah. Ilegal inmigration is only defended by SWPL’s doing their usual status jockeying and pseudo-plantation owners scum that wants to depress wages and not obey labor laws.
Fuck them both.
This spills over in the living wage argument for low skill jobs. What many fail to realize is that a glut of workers are the causes for low wages. Never mind the immigrants who will work and compete for them. So if they manage to get living wages, the price increases that follow to make up for it basically make it a push. And they’re right back where they started from.
If low-wage, low-skilled workers from Mexico are such a great boon for our economy, why isn’t Mexico’s economy booming?
It is up to the community, at large, to decide how much immigration is acceptable. This restaurant owner is no more important than any other member of his community.
I’m charmed by the moral side of the argument that we benefit and our economy benefits from compensating illegal workers too little, i.e. from exploiting them.
Indeed, it’s the best of all possible worlds that the wages paid by restauranteurs/agribusiness/hotels/Walmart for busboys/field hands/maids/janitors are far lower than what native workers would consider a fair exchange.
Righty capitalist elites and lefty SWPL elites can agree on one thing — the virtues of electing a new people to replace the one they were saddled with.
Amazing the contortions that the left has to pull off to – (a) support immigration, and (b) act as the voice of the lower class.
The only way they have managed to pull it off is to avoid any real debate, and shout down any dissenters as racists. With the death of old media and the harsh economic times (when Gen X finally realises that it will never be as well off as its parents) this will end sooner or later.
At that point you will find that no-one ever supported mass immigration, and that they only wanted limited immigration for the ‘good of the country’ – but that levels got ‘out of control’ – no-one’s fault of course – just one of those inevitable things.
Mass immigration is one of the very few government policies that you can never walk back from. Once your culture is gone it will never come back. I can forgive the left and the out of touch rich a lot of their stupid ideas, but not this one.
Still you can get a kebab in Sydney day or night. Small price to pay for drive-by shootings..
alexmenos, Mexico’s economy is rising at about 4 percent I believe. The illegals coming here are doing so because Mexico has no social safety net. We are it.
If low-wage, low-skilled workers from Mexico are such a great boon for our economy, why isn’t Mexico’s economy booming?
If low wages are such a boon then why doesn’t the left support a drop in the minimum wage ?
How the fuck do these lefties keep all their stories in line – write them on their hands ?
Profound.
Free trade (of which Mass-Immigrationism is large part) is a scam.
Fat-ass Americans could easily absorb price increases, expecially on such seemingly staple foods as Twinkies and Hostess Ho Hos.
It’s for your own good.
The only way they have managed to pull it off is to avoid any real debate, and shout down any dissenters as racists. With the death of old media and the harsh economic times (when Gen X finally realises that it will never be as well off as its parents) this will end sooner or later.
Podsnap — I think the time-frame you’re looking at when Baby Boomers begin dying off in significant numbers. The generation that aborted roughly a one third of their own children and replaced their children with low-skilled immigrants in order to support their fat-assed consumerism isn’t likely to welcome an honest opinion from the average gen-x white guy any time soon.
me and my lousy html skillz
Immigration from Latin America has largely stopped, due to the depressed economy here and, more singificantly, demographic changes in Latin America.
It appears you guys are fighting yesteryear’s battles.
If at the moment net immigration is slowing, that doesn’t matter: firstly, because that can change if our economy improves compared to countries like Mexico, and secondly, because the current administration is opposed to immigration enforcement. They have been refusing to enforce immigration at a federal level and fighting states that try to enforce the laws themselves. So it’s still very much today’s battle, unless the political climate changes.
This idea that illegals are doing “jobs Americans won’t do” is a bunch of nonsense. Ask an unemployed high school kid who’s desperate for a job if he’s “unwilling” to do menial work. These days you could even ask a graduating PhD.
“There is no ‘n’ in restaurateur.”
Are you making a racial slur against blacks?
“Immigration from Latin America has largely stopped, due to the depressed economy here and, more singificantly, demographic changes in Latin America.”
demographic wave matters. the goal now is to repatriate as many illegals as possible before they squirt out more generations of teat suckers.
“It appears you guys are fighting yesteryear’s battles.”
pruning branches is exactly what liberals want their enemies to do. but you’ve gotta attack the root to kill the invasive species.
+1
Oh, the loyal troops will NEVER RELENT
until they declare final victory
even over last decade’s
battles
This would be an unexpected game-changer: AZ secceeds from the Union.
If low-wage unskilled immigrant workers result in lower prices for consumers, then why not import low-wage CEOs for even lower prices? Or solve the whole health care crisis by importing low-wage doctors to lower health care costs. And like a poster somewhere earlier said regarding the AEI claim that every 100 H2B visa immigrant workers create 464 jobs for native Americans — we could put 4.6 million Americans to work if we just gave out 1 million H2B visas. Isn’t that the best and fastest solution to ending unemployment in America?
Others have observed that liberals’ support for legal and illegal immigration has permanently pushed many, many low-skilled blacks out of the workforce.
Nobody goes to a restaurant to save money so crying poor is a red herring.
Chuck, maybe you can confirm this: years ago i heard that most of O.G.’s entrees are mass-produced and shipped into each restaurant, where the “chefs” simply dunk a plastic pouch into boiling water, and serve it in a bowl, or over pasta. If this is true, then what special skill could possibly be encoded into the mexican DNA, that prohibits a non-mexican from performing the same function?
(Not saying there’s anything wrong with the method. It’s surely the only way to have uniformity in the food, across a nationwide chain of stores, i mean, restaurants).
And, good fucking god, if these lunatics were right, the nation would starve without fucking mexicans — Without mexicans, crops would rot, unpicked, on the farms; and now, Without mexicans, the unpicked food would rot, uncooked, in the kitchen.
The biggest argument for illegal immigration and allowing anyone to come here regardless of standards or citizenship is this:
It’s racist to have any other opinion; citizenship is evil; poor migrants must always be accomodated no matter what they do.
It’s raw, unadulterated Marxist classism, or anti-classism. Citizenship is the basic, core fundamental class regulator: those who are “in”, and those who are “out”.
Alas, denying this denies the very tribal nature of people. Every identity we have is tribal in nature.
I tell you this: A Korean knows exactly who is “in” and who is not. They may tolerate “foreigners”, but they’re permanently. always outsiders. Friendly outsiders. But not One Of Us.
The left needs people to be interchangeable, all identical, exactly the same. It breaks this only to rectify the proper class-regimented distribution of resources. When it does this, peopel are no longer individuals, but are merely ciphers for members of classes. An individual man is no longer an individual with unique needs and desires, but “Man”. Same for “woman”.
Illegal immigration is also a way to negate the apparent evils of Americanness. Even if only the US is committing immigration suicide and culture/population replacement, it’s okay: The US is the greatest evil and American are the most evil pepole to ever have lived. All other cultures and peoples are much, much better.
This attitude is both common and when presented this way, most wil lobject to it. But then they say “But you know…” indicating basic agreement with the premise.
Another issue relates to Americans.
The Left sold Americans a bill of goods: We can all have white-collar jobs, all fulfilling, and college degrees are everyone’s birthright.
In fact, we only need so many managers, and now Americans are unwilling to do many jobs. They’d rather sit out the economy and whine.
This is not “old codger says people don’t work any more” – it’s actually true. There’s a generalizes sense of entitlement that asys; I’m a unique flower. I deserve everything.
Thids is especially true among 20-30 year-old women, and I know that elsewhere, it’s not the case. So it’s not just a thing that more 20-30 year-old women are subject to.
Hey,that approach is working well.
Lumber outlets are closing left and right,heck even a title company went out of business because no houses were being sold.
Part of why the economy is in the tank is due to handouts to every tom dick and harry that can jump a fence.
Meanwhile Homeland Security has it’s priorities buttoning up the Canadian border from those evil Michiganders,and conversely,protecting the US
from those evil Canadians.
Apparently the ‘constitution free zone’ does not apply to fence jumpers,but to law abiding US citizens,perhaps to keep them from enforcing the border themselves.
Here’s an idea:
Smuggle thousands of assault weapons into Mexico and blame it upon US citizens,then use Executive Power to cover up the deed.
After all those pesky 2nd amendment rights are holding up the envisioned utopia.
Everyone knows that the United States had no restaurants before we brought in massive numbers of illegal immigrants to use as cheap labor. It was economically impossible!
Abelard Lindsay -
Immigration from Latin America has largely stopped, due to the depressed economy here and, more singificantly, demographic changes in Latin America.
It appears you guys are fighting yesteryear’s battles.
Really ? You mean illegal immigration right ? The stufff that there is no record of – so any ‘stop’ that you talk of is based on no evidence at all.
Beacuse you can’t mean legal immigration which has been higher in the 2000s than ever before, and which is less than half made up of Latino immigration anyway. And which has solidly been over the 1m per year mark for 2007 – 2011 – with 2011 being higher than 2010.
And what are these demographic changes exactly ? Do you mean that every prick has left so there is no-one else to come ? Or do you mean that Latinos are getting old so that no-one is going to come ? Like Hondurans – median age 21, or Guatemalans – median age 18. And don’t worry there is an inexhaustible supply of teenage Africans on the horizon.
And so what if the tidal wave turns into a flood ? You still have all the pricks you already let in – and as the majority of immigration is family migration – you still have to let all their families in – going right back to grand uncle Jagdish and his 50 kids who are still on the farm waiting for jute to become a money spinner.
Hardly ‘yesteryear’s battles’ – you wordy, pretentious cock.
And Firepower – I’m having a little bit of trouble taking you seriously.
Here you are, some type of backwoods-living, white supremacist militia man, a few shades to the right of Adolf Hitler – willing to agree with some NYT talking point that immigration is no longer a problem, purely for the purpose of shitting on Piggy and his commenters.
Can you see my problem ?
On the other hand maybe you do agree with Tryhard Lindsay – if so, time to leave your Unabomber cabin, put away the chemistry textbooks, move to San Fran and enjoy the diversity.
“Exactly. I have a an ongoing argument with a friend of mine that claims that we benefit from illegal immigration because of lower prices. This is obviously (to me anyways) incorrect. The seller of a home (or any product) is not going to say, “You know, I built this house for pennies thanks to all the illegal mexicans that I used to build it, so I’m going to do the buyers a solid and knock 30% off the price!” The price of a product is whatever the market can support, and the same is true whether we are talking homes, or restaurant meals, or ipods. The seller wants to maximize his profits, that’s the point. The mythological benefits of free trade and immigation are entirely invented by corporations.”
I think Econ 101 agrees with your friend here. It’s true that sellers aren’t going to pass on a cost decrease out of the goodness of their hearts, but if they operate in a competitive market, they will be forced to pass on some of the benefits of low wages to consumers. When the cost of labor goes down, the supply curve shifts outward, which means that equilibrium quantity goes up and price goes down. Intuitively, as it gets more profitable to produce, more stuff gets produced, which means sellers have to appeal to more buyers to move their product, which means they have to cut prices. “Whatever the market can support” is not a fixed amount, it varies based on how big the market is.
“The argument is that US natives won’t do work such as home building which means that home builders and their higher-level support staff won’t have jobs either. But, as usual, this is an issue with the question “at what price?” attached to it. Americans would be willing to work these jobs if wages weren’t tamped down by an influx of immigrant labor supply.”
The argument isn’t that they won’t do it, it’s precisely that they won’t do it for a low price. If you get rid of the low wage people, the supple curve shifts inward, prices go up, quantity goes down, and some high wage Americans lose their jobs along with the low wage immigrants. The intuition is, as the industry gets less profitable, less is produced, sellers have to appeal to fewer buyers, which means they’ll be able to cater exclusively to the buyers who will stick around even if they raise prices.
Now of course there’s more to life than Econ 101 and I’m not saying you may not be right in the grand scheme of things. (For example, I can’t say whether the main point of this post, that we have too many restaurants, is correct or incorrect, because “too many” is not a concept in Econ 101. Nor, for that matter, is citizenship. So yes, it leaves a lot out.) But on the narrow point of: Can low wage immigration lower prices without lowering American wages?, the answer is “yes”.
Econ 101 – importing low wage people has a direct effect on low skill wages. You seem to be saying that by lowering prices generally it will have an indirect positive effect on other wages to keep them the same (or raise them ?).
The idea that importing low skill people will cut low skill wages and have no effect on high skill wages is pretty uncontroversial on the alt right. If you are arguing that low skill wages will also be unaffected then I disagree. I believe that the direct effect in lowering wages in low skill occupations will be greater than any offsetting indirect effect. To back that up I tend to look at low skill occupations and see how many white faces are doing them.
So far I am still talking pidgin English to the cabby.
Yeah, that immigration problem! It’s outrageous, ain’t it? All your talking about it – well lemme tellya – ONE day, it should be fixed. That’s my wish.
Whew, I feel so much better now that I vented!
You’re the wisest & bravest speaker in the midst of your groupthink – you even make up funny insults. YOU, should start a blog – get on the honored blogrolls. Only The Best make the cut.
But you didn’t say talk = bullshit up the page did you ? You said it wasn’t a problem. Hence my point.
Thanks for compiling my greatest hits – you are quite the fanboy.
Podsnap – I’m saying that the extra low wage workers could make industries viable that would not be viable without them, and so could support high wage jobs in those industries that would simply not exist (or not exist at the same scale) without the low wage workers to support them. This may be well understood on the alt right – the bit of the post that I quoted seemed to disagree with it, thus motivating me to leave a comment.
I don’t know whether low skill Americans will be helped by these extra viable industries, although they certainly could be if just speaking English because a rare and in demand skill (e.g. bus boy under low immigration system gets to be bartender in high immigration system). Also the immigrants themselves demand services that low wage people provide. Whether this actually tips out to benefit the low skill Americans is an empirical question that goes way beyond Econ 101. I don’t think your looking at the demographics of people doing low wage jobs is a good way to answer this question though; the whole idea is that the non-immigrants are doing complementary jobs to the low wage jobs, not the low wage jobs themselves.
Here is the problem with this econ 101 perspective. For this ‘cost saving’ to work you’d have to be talking about the payroll being spent on an increased number of, and hence increased productivity of lower paid employees, which isn’t what happens at all. Companies didn’t go with cheaper labor because they were looking to expand their business.
Payroll stays relatively static, 1 Mexican replaces 1 American, productivity may even go down marginally here (which increases price, and so does the increased demand from additional consumers). Management pays itself most of the ‘saved’ payroll, skewing the expected salary of managers across the entire industry in question. The savings offered by scale and increased productivity aren’t happening because that isn’t the goal in ‘cutting payroll’.
Scale also comes with increased overhead, so it isn’t de facto true that increasing productivity and expanding business is necessarily more profitable to those calling the shots. Opening a new branch in another part of the country might be a huge increase in revenue over time but requires an unacceptable amount of seed capital in the present. Then you add the negative tax incentives into the equation as well. You pitch an expansion idea that shows a lot of promise…2 years down the road at the cost of some seed capital (decreased income of decision makers) in the present, and that’s a big nope. You gotta spend money to make money right? Well, not when you can import a bunch of immigrants, in which case you can just spend less money and pocket the difference.
In most instances immigrant labor is brought in to increase profit instead of expanding business. Expanding business is a lot of hard work, and hiring illegals is not. Not every business owner, or manager is this Oliver Stone Wall Street caricature. A lot of them are just looking for private sector sinecures and aren’t interested in engaging in 80h work weeks, in a cut throat, dog eat dog environment when they get 6-weeks of paid vacation and a high salary. They’d rather work less than the clock punchers, put in as little effort as possible and enjoy the good life. They aren’t going to make more work for themselves, and they are going to jump at any chance to increase their own QoL if it doesn’t involve actual effort, and that is the perverse incentive of immigrant labor.
Also it’s a pretty gross over simplification to say that the market is in anyway ‘competitive’ in econ 101 terms. Agribusiness is not competitive at all and is practically cartelized. Restaurants are much less competitive than people think since non-franchised chains dominate the landscape and all of them are owned by a handful of parent companies, which are themselves publicly traded and probably have considerable overlap in shareholders.
Yeah. Start a blog. It ought to be great.
If illegal immigrants were forbidden to have kids it might be a good deal for America.
Hey everybody,
A bit late to the party, and at the risk of derailing the thread, here’s my newest/latest in response to Chuck’s recent Gabi Gregg post:
Gabi Gregg “Fatkini”: Response To Readers
http://obsidianraw.bravejournal.com/entry/94654
Carry on…
O.
Many of the agribusinesses employing immigrants, legally or illegally, receive large USDA subsidies.
I’d appreciate a pointer to where a smart and knowledgeable immigration proponent addresses this train of reasoning:
In-migration at the rate of 5 million people per year into the U.S. has benefited the country.
In-migration at the rate of 10 million people per year into the U.S. would benefit the country.
In-migration at the rate of 20 million people per year into the U.S. would benefit the country.
Since higher immigration is always good and never bad, why stop at the recent pace of 5 to 10 million per year? Why not press for 20 million? That’s an influx of 200 million in a decade, to a country of ~320 million. I can’t foresee any problems arising from the 2022 U.S. having 520 million residents (plus kids born here, of course). Electing a new people: what could possibly go wrong?
It’s also fun to listen to enviro focused lefties lament how Americans use far more resources, generate far more CO2 and pollute more than everyone else, but then support non-stop immigration of people from lower enviro impact nations into the USA. Modern leftism requires doublethink on almost every conversation.
“Payroll stays relatively static, 1 Mexican replaces 1 American”
Illegals have been influencing the labor market for decades now, and of course their presence changes business decisions. When business owners decide how many people to hire, they make that decision based on the wage they will actually have to pay, not the wage they would have paid an American in the hypothetical situation where there was no Illegal immigration. They don’t first calculate how many Americans they could hire and then as step two replace those Americans with Mexicans, they just go straight to figuring out how many people they want to hire at the going rate. And if the going rate is low it will make sense to hire more people, and/or lay off fewer people.
Everything you’re saying about expanding a business being a hassle is true, but it would also be true in a world with no low wage immigrants. Adding the option of low wage labor isn’t going to make every business owner want to expand, but you only need some businesses to expand (or not fail) to increase overall employment.
we’ve always had illegal labor. from the time it was indentured servitude (legal for awhile), to child labors like chimney sweeps and during the immigrant waves to America, to then just having mass immigrant labor be it chinese on the railroads, filipinos before the dust bowl/depression brought the okies to California, et cetera.
we want cheap stuff. someone has to do that cheap work. period.
You appear to have forgotten importation of goods TAllagash.
The countries outside of the west who have never allowed mass immigration probably want cheap stuff as well – they seem to get by OK.
Your comment has added very little to the debate.
Again, what I’d like to hear from the pro-mass-immigration side of the debate are their answers to “What rate of immigration would be too high? And why?”
In the absence of responses from leading cheerleaders, I take the actual answer to be, “It’s all good, there’s no level of immigration that’s too high.”
If that’s the elite consensus, fair enough. But let’s discuss it. Let’s vote on it.
Instead of assigning an absolute number to “rate of immigration”, I think it would be better to draw up an index that assigned value to immigrants and to then shoot for a certain total based on the index.
Let’s use a single upstanding, law-abiding, tax-paying, 100-IQ American-born citizen as the benchmark. So an immigrant who moves to the US, learns to speak English (a foreign accent is fine) and behaves exactly like a typical American is basically just as valuable. The country benefits from his presence just as it would from a native-born citizen living the same way, so he’s worth plus-one. (Maybe more, because the public saves on the expenses of schooling him if he arrived as an adult. More still if he has kids who also live exemplary lives.)
Someone who ignores the laws, steals and robs from people, leeches money from the welfare system, clogs up the courts and prisons, and generally makes the country a worse place to live in is worth *much less than zero*, because it takes many upstanding people to balance out the societal dysfunction that this person causes. If he has children who follow in his footsteps, even less than that.
Of course, i have no idea how you’d evaluate what someone’s “citizen equivalency score” would be likely to end up at when you’re at the stage of deciding whether or not to admit him as an immigrant. The immigration point systems supposedly in use in Australia and Canada would be a start, but those only add up positive things and need to have demerits factored in somewhere.
This blog is the crucial juncture where one can Answer The BIG Questions, like: “What does obsidian think of what chuck thinks about…fatkinis.”
I can answer, stolidly that those fatkinis, they’re bad, mkay?
Obsidian likes ‘em big.
This is complete sophistry.
Right now white nurses are being fired and replaced with flips. Less than one generation ago kitchen staff at restaurants was overwhelmingly white, now nearly 100% Mexican. All those gas stations and convenience stores were not run by Pakistanis.
At some point in the very recent past the businesses that employ all of these foreigners employed natives but let them go. As is happening right now, native citizens are being replaced with foreigners because the foreigners are cheaper to hire. Lower wages equals potentially more jobs for people willing to work those lower wages, but that hasn’t panned out in reality. Some more jobs have been created but for the most part all that payroll reduction has been shifted into compensating executives.
When Dell outsourced their entire manufacturing operation to Taiwan in the late 90s and early aughts they didn’t decrease output one iota. They didn’t create one new job. The executives just paid themselves big bonuses. The importers of foreign (legal and illegal) labor do the exact same thing.
Sure, a generation down the line when all hospital staff is South Asian there might be ‘more jobs’, but the percentage of the budget spent on staff versus administration is permanently shifted. The raw dollars and cents is irrelevant. Iin the future there will be ‘more jobs’, for people willing to take them for less. Completely misses the point.
If the Hospital dedicates 35% of their budget on compensation for RNs, orderlies, et cetera, and then can reduce that amount down to 20% by replacing them with cheaper foreigners and spending that ‘saved’ money on the execs making the call then at no point in the future is the Hospital ever going to shift that increased exec compensation back into hiring more nurses. It’s now an industry standard that you spend 20% of budget on non-MD staff, and administrators pay is likewise permanently shifted upwards so that you can’t find a qualified administrator at the pre-immigrant rate.
When a new Hospital is built, or an existing one has its’ endowment increased that smaller fraction of the budget might be used to hire more employees at the now permanently lower rate, but it’s far from a 1:1 exchange. They didn’t wind up employing more or better staff for the same amount of money. The Hospital didn’t get better, it probably even got worse. Absolutely no change was made except who gets what percentage of the tab paid by the patient.
We’ll use the waiting tables example since it’s popular here. All American waiter staff gets replaced with Mexicans over night. These Mexicans work at the $2-4/h rate with no tips. The management incorporates a 15% gratuity into the price of the meal and keep it for themselves. Restaurants are wildly more profitable, consumers have saved nothing or very little. The service is worse. This is what is actually happening.
Due to the sudden increase in restaurant profitability (possibly despite a decrease in the number of customers) more are opened and more jobs are ‘created’, but only at a rate acceptable to people who both don’t live here now, or expect to have to do things like pay taxes, or repay loans, or not live entirely off of welfare. No one benefits except for a handful of managerial parasites.
This is the Texas ‘economic boom’. Lots of jobs created! For illegal immigrants that are living off of welfare, and not paying taxes that is. For natives, it’s the same as everywhere else. Yet somehow things cost more or less the same in Texas as they do in Vermont despite all of this alleged cost saving going on.
No it would not be true. The difference is that if you aren’t happy with your current pay as an executive you have to actually make the business more profitable by increasing output in some way, not by simply cutting costs. There’s a world of difference between a salesman who wants to make more money so he works harder and puts in more time than the one who is going to organize a strike to form a salesman union so they can demand a larger commission.
Likewise there is a huge difference between businesses working to make more profit and ones colluding to lobby the government to have favorable immigration policy so they can take a larger slice of the operating budget. In the former scenario in both cases hard work and risk of failure are involved, and their is communal benefit for everyone. In the latter case they’ve literally done nothing but found a way to be a more effective parasite.
We’ll use the waiting tables example since it’s popular here. All American waiter staff gets replaced with Mexicans over night. These Mexicans work at the $2-4/h rate with no tips. The management incorporates a 15% gratuity into the price of the meal and keep it for themselves. Restaurants are wildly more profitable, consumers have saved nothing or very little. The service is worse. This is what is actually happening.
Exactly. But Former Econ TA says that the extra wages (to the Mexicans – although this is not really extra – as wages – more wages – were paid to the former American employees) and profits (to the bosses) go to increase wages to low skill Americans (perhaps the low skill Americans who used to work at the restaurant) – pehaps as English teachers for the Mexicans and butlers and whores for the business owners.
The fundamental problem with TA’s argument is that as these jobs were not profitable without the low wage impetus (but now are because of the boost from low wage Mexicans) they are marginal jobs which won’t pay much and are low skill.
I actually read an article in the Economist about the future of work which actually suggested this – that ‘talent’ would be increasingly valuable in the future and that those who did not have ‘talent’ (whatever the fuck that is today) would be able to work in personal services for those who did.
The base argument is that the low skill Americans lose their jobs but ‘move up the value chain’. This is the same argument as is used to justify outsourcing. How’s that working for us ? Lawyers are now getting outsourced – not sure how they ‘move up the value chain’.
And as far as the business owners go – yes, they benefit – lucky them – America now has more gated off plutocrats.
No-one denies that immigration has benefits for certain people in society – business owners and the ‘helper’ class (some lawyers, social workers, ESL teachers, bureaucrats, ) – ie the scum who are behind the racket.
We don’t need no education…from piggy.
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I know that some of my friend have been having some immigration issues. They’ve been thinking about getting a good immigration lawyer to help out. Do you know of any? We had been looking at this one: http://www.rathilaw.com/, what would you suggest?