It’s not a fair comparison, as others have said. If they didn’t have people taking those ultra low wages, they might actually get others. Legal workers and American workers will take hard, thankless and difficult jobs… for the right price. These are not the right not the price. And yeah we’d have to pay more, and/or we would import from another source.
In this particular instance, and I didn’t see it myself mind you, it was more along the lines of ‘hell no, I ain’t working in some damn field’. There was a disconnect between illegals taking jobs and the fact that someone had to do those jobs. Of course, you could argue, someone else would take that job, potentially opening up a different job for this guy.
The number of people who screw up their own and dependents SSN’s and thus get them eradicated is crazy. While I can search the systems to try and verify a primary or secondary SSN I am not allowed to search the system for dependents.
I felt bad about it for a few days, but after hundreds of them I kinda feel now like they screwed up and so they got to pay the price for it.
How exactly do we all benefit if we get rid of all the undocumented workers and start paying more for produce, etc? What benefit does it gain us to offset the higher prices? The feeling of “Fuck yeah, we stopped those damn illegals from trying to escape a shitty life!”? Is that the end goal? Is it all the murders that Fox News tells us the illegal aliens are doing on a daily/hourly basis?
If you were stuck in a shitty situation and thought you could make things better for your family, wouldn’t you do the same thing?
Or in the near dystopian future, you could see someone on welfare being forced to take this kind of job.
So with the case of Maryland’s crab problem, one of the biggest concerns the migrant workers have is the ability to send the money back home, out of the country. Yes, migrant workers, legal or otherwise, do spend some of their money locally but a lot of it goes to Mexico which isn’t usually the case for a lot of workers. I mean cities aren’t fighting over factories and headquarters so they can employee 100s or 1000s of workers to pump all that money out of the city. They’re expecting people to work there, live there, and buy there.
Now anyone without legal status is not just underpaid they’re in a n extreme position of allowing the employer to do pretty much anything they want or risk losing their job. This is not good for the worker either.
Probably. I’ve done some shit jobs just to get by. I’d do them again if it meant not, you know, starving… so this claim that no one will take these jobs… it’s bullshit. When we’re at high employment, yeah they probably can’t underpay and expect to fill those openings. The fact they don’t have generations working these fields is the employers fault. They don’t pay fair wages. Some don’t offer good working conditions, and yeah I’d rather pay more for my product and have workers there who are legal and afforded rights and proper wages than get my strawberries for 50 cents a pound.
And it is possible that if prices went up we’d see more imports, well that happens too.
I don’t really know the answer. I think in a perfect world you would let a certain number in, promise them citizenship at some point if they follow the rules and absorb them into the work force. But allowing anyone who wants to come in opens it up for abuse, on both ends.
Robots are taking all the jobs! Except Robot Repairman. Or maybe Robot Repairer-Repairman.
Maybe we should just embrace our Eloi future.
I’m all for an exchange program where we accept a certain number of immigrants into the country while simultaneously expelling an equal (or even greater) number of Nazis, deplorables, Evangelicals, etc.
What country would take them?
We could just air drop them into Somalia or Yemen.
Substantially improved standard of living for formerly low wage workers. The impact would also flow beyond the low wage segment to society. Increased income for low wage households is statistically likely to increase school participation by the children, reduce criminal participation, improve health outcomes for kids and adults, and just generally make them happier. Money does equal happiness up to a certain point on the Maslow hierarchy. Reduced crime would improve quality of life for a broad chunk of society, and would also reduce the need for police, which in turn would reduce the need for government spending.
I thought that was pretty obvious so I’m kind of wondering where rowe23’s question comes from.
I’m thinking Jackassistan.
I just don’t see how it would work if we suddenly lose the entire undocumented workforce. Unemployment is low already so it’s not like we have this massive crowd of people needing these jobs. All of those benefits sound good on paper, just can’t see it actually happening. Plus the moral cost of forcibly removing them, losing their children to traffickers, etc. All that fun stuff.
Um, I’ve always said that employer level enforcement needs to be part of a comprehensive immigration reform which includes a path to citizenship for those already here.
By doing things that way, you don’t harm those already here, and it also means the wage effects will phase in slowly: you won’t suddenly reduce the workforce but rather cut off or drastically reduce the future flow of illegal employees. This would create a gradual upward pressure on low-end wages in several job categories.
As to where the labor would come from to replace the future flow of illegal labor, although we have low unemployment per our definitions, there is still some slack in the US workforce, specifically people who are either “underemployed” or who are staying out of the workforce b/c the current low wages simply don’t replace what they are doing: elder care, child care and so forth. The underemployment issue is pretty big. There are a lot of people working sub-40 hour jobs or a pastiche of part time jobs who would be glad to have a decent paying full time permanent job.
And on top of that, if it did turn out that we need more future flow of workers, we could always lift our caps on legal immigrants. IIRC, it is 675,000 per year - it’s something we set by law and we could raise it if we chose.
Isn’t the unemployment figure kind of one of the biggest lies in government statistical reporting? I mean isn’t it a figure that leaves out millions of people who have basically just been out of the work force for so long that they no longer look for work, or something like that.
You’re off script, Scuzz. That’s only true when a Democrat is President. Now that a Republican is President the numbers are real and great and why do you hate our troops?
Edit: Here’s a chart from Gallup that purports to be the “real” unemployment rate, which is still very, very low, historically.
To measure unemployment, Gallup recommends using what we call the “Real Unemployment” metric from the BLS – which combines those who are unemployed, underemployed and marginally attached to the workforce.
I bet he fucking wouldn’t, because it’s backbreaking.
I’m not sure farmers can pay market wages for laborers. In the past farmers have paid low wages or no wages and still struggled, even with government subsidies.
Struggled against whom? Do you specifically mean small farmers versus big agra? I assume if the price of food went up across the board we would all have to suck it up?