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Ok, then what does a ditch digger deserve to be paid? The answer is a number.

Consultant32452 10y ago
The cumulative impact to low wage native workers is estimated between $99-118 Billion per year. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/gborjas/publications/popular/CIS2013.pdf https://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/gborjas/publications/popular/... (page 2)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
Consultant32452 10y ago
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/magazine/do-illegal-immigrants-actually-hurt-the-us-economy.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/magazine/do-illegal-immigr... Labor economists have concluded that undocumented workers have lowered the wages of U.S. adults without a high-school diploma — 25 million of them — by anywhere between 0.4 to 7.4 percent.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- stickfigure 10y ago
  ...and increased the wages of otherwise poor Guatemalans, Mexicans, and their families by thousands of percent. Why exactly should I be opposed to this?
  - Consultant32452 10y ago
    I don't think it's noble to be charitable with someone else's money, especially when that someone else is already at the poverty level.
    - twblalock 10y ago
      Poverty is relative. What we call poverty is a lot more comfortable, and safer, than the conditions the immigrants came from. We haven't eliminated poverty in this country because we keep moving the goalposts.
      - Consultant32452 10y ago
        If you're concerned then send your own money, don't advocate policies that take it from our poorest.
        twblalock 10y ago
        I never advocated a policy. Why do you think I did? You are reading a lot into my comments that isn't there.
    - stickfigure 10y ago
      Let me see if I understand this: In your worldview, allowing the brown-skinned person next door to bid on the same work that you are bidding on is equivalent to taking money from you?
- twblalock 10y ago
  This is the paragraph immediately following the sentence you quoted: > The impact on everyone else, though, is surprisingly positive. Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, Davis, has written a series of influential papers comparing the labor markets in states with high immigration levels to those with low ones. He concluded that undocumented workers do not compete with skilled laborers — instead, they complement them. Economies, as Adam Smith argued in “Wealth of Nations,” work best when workers become specialized and divide up tasks among themselves. Pedro Chan’s ability to take care of routine tasks on a work site allows carpenters and electricians to focus on what they do best. In states with more undocumented immigrants, Peri said, skilled workers made more money and worked more hours; the economy’s productivity grew. From 1990 to 2007, undocumented workers increased legal workers’ pay in complementary jobs by up to 10 percent. Don't make it look one-sided. Besides, you didn't tell me what you think a ditch digger should earn, which is what I asked. But that's fine, because you can't tell me, because you don't know. In fact, nobody knows. It is an unanswerable question. Much like determining what someone's "fair share" of taxes or benefits is, or their fair standard of living, it is impossible to determine the income they "deserve." There is no absolute standard for any of these things. The only way to know if someone is being fairly compensated is to compare their income to some kind of absolute standard -- but such a standard does not exist. In the case of unskilled American workers, maybe their incomes are 0.4-7.4% lower than they would have been in the absence of immigrants. But that by itself does not tell us anything about fairness. Perhaps they were overpaid before the immigrants showed up -- after all, there were other people willing to do the job for less money, so what did the American workers have to offer that justified a higher salary for doing the same work? Again, in the absence of an absolute standard of what their income ought to be, it is impossible to know if they are fairly paid, underpaid, or overpaid.
  - Consultant32452 10y ago
    So your argument is that it's okay that we've made it worse for the people who already had it the hardest because the rest of the more wealthy people in the country benefitted from it? Sorry, but that doesn't make it better. As for the rest of your post, my comment implied a context of the moral an legal framework currently in place in the US and most countries people would actually want to live in. But you're willing to dismiss major components of domestic and international law as well as the basic moral principles most of us live by with a vague existentialist argument about whether fairness even exists. We're not even debating the same thing, and what you want to debate isn't something I'm interested in debating.

The cumulative impact to low wage native workers is estimated between $99-118 Billion per year. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/gborjas/publications/popular/CIS2013.pdf https://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/gborjas/publications/popular/... (page 2)

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

Consultant32452 10y ago

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/magazine/do-illegal-immigrants-actually-hurt-the-us-economy.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/magazine/do-illegal-immigr... Labor economists have concluded that undocumented workers have lowered the wages of U.S. adults without a high-school diploma — 25 million of them — by anywhere between 0.4 to 7.4 percent.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
stickfigure 10y ago
...and increased the wages of otherwise poor Guatemalans, Mexicans, and their families by thousands of percent. Why exactly should I be opposed to this?
- Consultant32452 10y ago
  I don't think it's noble to be charitable with someone else's money, especially when that someone else is already at the poverty level.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    Poverty is relative. What we call poverty is a lot more comfortable, and safer, than the conditions the immigrants came from. We haven't eliminated poverty in this country because we keep moving the goalposts.
    - Consultant32452 10y ago
      If you're concerned then send your own money, don't advocate policies that take it from our poorest.
      - twblalock 10y ago
        I never advocated a policy. Why do you think I did? You are reading a lot into my comments that isn't there.
  - stickfigure 10y ago
    Let me see if I understand this: In your worldview, allowing the brown-skinned person next door to bid on the same work that you are bidding on is equivalent to taking money from you?
twblalock 10y ago
This is the paragraph immediately following the sentence you quoted: > The impact on everyone else, though, is surprisingly positive. Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, Davis, has written a series of influential papers comparing the labor markets in states with high immigration levels to those with low ones. He concluded that undocumented workers do not compete with skilled laborers — instead, they complement them. Economies, as Adam Smith argued in “Wealth of Nations,” work best when workers become specialized and divide up tasks among themselves. Pedro Chan’s ability to take care of routine tasks on a work site allows carpenters and electricians to focus on what they do best. In states with more undocumented immigrants, Peri said, skilled workers made more money and worked more hours; the economy’s productivity grew. From 1990 to 2007, undocumented workers increased legal workers’ pay in complementary jobs by up to 10 percent. Don't make it look one-sided. Besides, you didn't tell me what you think a ditch digger should earn, which is what I asked. But that's fine, because you can't tell me, because you don't know. In fact, nobody knows. It is an unanswerable question. Much like determining what someone's "fair share" of taxes or benefits is, or their fair standard of living, it is impossible to determine the income they "deserve." There is no absolute standard for any of these things. The only way to know if someone is being fairly compensated is to compare their income to some kind of absolute standard -- but such a standard does not exist. In the case of unskilled American workers, maybe their incomes are 0.4-7.4% lower than they would have been in the absence of immigrants. But that by itself does not tell us anything about fairness. Perhaps they were overpaid before the immigrants showed up -- after all, there were other people willing to do the job for less money, so what did the American workers have to offer that justified a higher salary for doing the same work? Again, in the absence of an absolute standard of what their income ought to be, it is impossible to know if they are fairly paid, underpaid, or overpaid.
- Consultant32452 10y ago
  So your argument is that it's okay that we've made it worse for the people who already had it the hardest because the rest of the more wealthy people in the country benefitted from it? Sorry, but that doesn't make it better. As for the rest of your post, my comment implied a context of the moral an legal framework currently in place in the US and most countries people would actually want to live in. But you're willing to dismiss major components of domestic and international law as well as the basic moral principles most of us live by with a vague existentialist argument about whether fairness even exists. We're not even debating the same thing, and what you want to debate isn't something I'm interested in debating.