4 ms·

It seems like an obvious result of the law of supply & demand that immigration will drive the price of labor down for jobs which those immigrants do: more (un-u

It seems like an obvious result of the law of supply & demand that immigration will drive the price of labor down for jobs which those immigrants do: more (un-unionized) labor = lower wages.

setra 10y ago
Followed by the cost of the government paying for their children (who will be citizens), because they certainly won't be able to afford to take care of several children on those low wage jobs. School, and welfare programs will add up, even if the parents themselves don't get much. The average cost per student in public school is $10,615 per year alone With Utah being on the low end with $6,000 per year.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  What's the cost to deport 11.1 million people? And is it more expensive to deport them then to assimilate them into the workforce on a permanent basis? Remember, the fertility rate drops when women are educated and their children don't die; this would suggest state funded education and the continuation of low income healthcare for children is the financially superior option to mass deportations.
  - jcape 10y ago
    According to https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/reports/2012/07/06/11888/the-facts-on-immigration-today/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/reports/... it's 285bn USD over 5 years to deport them, and GDP would decrease by 1.45% over 10 years without undocumented/illegal immigrant participation (i.e. 0.145% drag every year---assuming this includes the relevant GDP multipliers).
  - adiabatty 10y ago
    You don't need to deport people; make it tough to earn a living and they'll move somewhere else — that's what brought them here in the first place. Arizona cracked down on illegal aliens a while back and their intensive-English courses enrollment dropped by 80,000 students. While intensive-English course enrollment is an imperfect proxy for "illegal" (some illegals don't need it anymore and some born here still do), this saved the state $350 million a year. Annual ER spending on noncitizens dropped from $167M to $106M. And between '00 and '04, the annual cost to state prisons from incarcerating noncitizen felons dropped 11% from $202M to $180M. At least $416M saved, per year on average, and Arizona didn't deport anybody. https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/03/16/arizonas-experience-and-the-tale-it-tells/ https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/03/16/arizonas-e... (numbers quoted from the WSJ article quoted near the end: ctrl-F for "Remember education?"
- mikekchar 10y ago
  > The average cost per student in public school is $10,615 per year alone That number surprises me. If you think that the loaded labour rate of a teacher is probably $100K, that gives you a teacher to student ratio of 1:10. Since the ratio is more like 1:30 or 1:40, that means that 65-75% of the cost of education is something other than teachers' salaries. I've got to think that's an indication that something is very, very wrong. Even accounting for the depreciation of the building and its contents, I wonder if quite a lot of money is being spent on something other than education...
  - ec109685 10y ago
    Average class size is way less than 30 to 40: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass1112_2013314_t1s_007.asp https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass1112_2013314_t1s...
    - mikekchar 10y ago
      Hmm... Very interesting. Much different than the class sizes I remember from my one and only year of education in the US. Also, very nice if true. I can't quite understand the data, though. In the description for self-contained and departmentalised the percentages don't even come close to adding up to 100%. Are there other styles of teaching whose data is not represented on this chart?
- maverick_iceman 10y ago
  Easy solution: stop social services for everybody.
  - bayesian_horse 10y ago
    Are you sure that is cheaper?
- dbg31415 10y ago
  Always good to cite your sources. (= * Education Spending Per Student by State || http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-education-spending-per-pupil-data.html http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-educa... I find this really interesting -- I wasn't able to figure out how to subtract transportation costs from the spend per pupil, probably good to also normalize school building maintenance costs where labor is more expensive. So this is certainly from the hip... If we assume the folks at US News did an OK job of ranking education performance... * How States Compare in the 2016 Best High Schools Rankings | Best High Schools | US News || http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/articles/how-states-compare http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/articles/h... Then we see that the states that were able to get the most bang for their buck were: 1) Utah 2) Florida 3) California 4) Nevada 5) Colorado 6) Arizona 7) Oklahoma 8) Georgia 9) Texas 10) Kentucky It'd be curious to look for similarities between these states. I suspect America is too diverse of a place that we won't find a one-size-fits-all answer to education. Vouchers may help some states, hurt others. Religious participation and divorce rates may help some states but not matter at all in others. Raw spend may matter (seems to help CT and DC), or not at all (seems to not matter much in AK or WY -- this is where factoring out transportation and school maintenance seems like it'd be important). Utah spends less than any state and still has exceptional performance... wonder if it scales... can you add more money to improve or does money not even matter?
- bayesian_horse 10y ago
  Making sure the next generation doesn't grow up destitute and uneducated is hardly even an altruistic goal. These children should be left out of this discussion. They didn't even have the opportunity to choose not to inconvenience you by their existence. They are US citizens just like you are. If there is a net transfer of tax dollars to children growing up in poverty - and there is preciously little of that - then all to the better.
pranjalv123 10y ago
Except immigrants also increase demand.
- chillacy 10y ago
  They increase demand for products (certain products that are local only to the destination country, not things they would buy anyways like a cellphone), but not jobs. Increased workforce will increase supply of labor much more than it will increase demand for that labor (which I can't think of a direct route which would cause that, except for general economic boom leading to more businesses, but that's pretty indirect)
  - bayesian_horse 10y ago
    That is a bunch of completely unproven assumptions. Of course immigrants increase the demand for labor. Even the illegal ones. You can't think of a direct route? Try the obvious ones: Who cuts their hair? Who fixes their car? Sells them groceries? It's even more obvious for legal immigrants. What's wrong with a general economic boom?
    - chillacy 10y ago
      Great for haircut salons: you get cheaper labor with an increased labor pool and you get more customers! Not great for the previous employees of the haircut salon. I'm not convinced that the increased demand for haircuts will outpace the wage loss that came with increased competition for that job.
bayesian_horse 10y ago
This simplified notion of "Supply and demand" does not work with immigration and labor. The obvious solution to your problem of lower wages would be to legalize illegal immigrants to give them equal rights and empower them to seek higher wages.
- coldtea 10y ago
  This wouldn't work either, because the majority of immigrants will still be unskilled, not speaking the language well etc, starting as dirt poor and having to work hand to mouth, and thus unable to "seek higher wages" for other reasons too aside from their illegal status.
  - heurist 10y ago
    In that case they'd have to go back to their home countries to find work.
coldtea 10y ago
Yes, but the average commenter on the site (or anybody middle class and above) will rarely be impacted negatively by this, and if anything they'll have some benefits from the cheaper low-skill labor available to them (e.g. for their companies, construction, services, etc). As for the low-skill working class people affected, the general sentiment is screw them. Or BS jokes like "if an immigrant that doesn't even speak the language can take your job, you didn't deserve it in the first place" (as if all jobs are dependent on verbal skills, e.g. mining, cleaning, gardening, construction work, etc). In the same vein, if visas for developers counted in the millions, there would be riots all over Silicon Valley, and angry letters to politicians...

It seems like an obvious result of the law of supply & demand that immigration will drive the price of labor down for jobs which those immigrants do: more (un-unionized) labor = lower wages.

setra 10y ago

Followed by the cost of the government paying for their children (who will be citizens), because they certainly won't be able to afford to take care of several children on those low wage jobs. School, and welfare programs will add up, even if the parents themselves don't get much. The average cost per student in public school is $10,615 per year alone With Utah being on the low end with $6,000 per year.

toomuchtodo 10y ago
What's the cost to deport 11.1 million people? And is it more expensive to deport them then to assimilate them into the workforce on a permanent basis? Remember, the fertility rate drops when women are educated and their children don't die; this would suggest state funded education and the continuation of low income healthcare for children is the financially superior option to mass deportations.
- jcape 10y ago
  According to https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/reports/2012/07/06/11888/the-facts-on-immigration-today/ https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/reports/... it's 285bn USD over 5 years to deport them, and GDP would decrease by 1.45% over 10 years without undocumented/illegal immigrant participation (i.e. 0.145% drag every year---assuming this includes the relevant GDP multipliers).
- adiabatty 10y ago
  You don't need to deport people; make it tough to earn a living and they'll move somewhere else — that's what brought them here in the first place. Arizona cracked down on illegal aliens a while back and their intensive-English courses enrollment dropped by 80,000 students. While intensive-English course enrollment is an imperfect proxy for "illegal" (some illegals don't need it anymore and some born here still do), this saved the state $350 million a year. Annual ER spending on noncitizens dropped from $167M to $106M. And between '00 and '04, the annual cost to state prisons from incarcerating noncitizen felons dropped 11% from $202M to $180M. At least $416M saved, per year on average, and Arizona didn't deport anybody. https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/03/16/arizonas-experience-and-the-tale-it-tells/ https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2016/03/16/arizonas-e... (numbers quoted from the WSJ article quoted near the end: ctrl-F for "Remember education?"
mikekchar 10y ago
> The average cost per student in public school is $10,615 per year alone That number surprises me. If you think that the loaded labour rate of a teacher is probably $100K, that gives you a teacher to student ratio of 1:10. Since the ratio is more like 1:30 or 1:40, that means that 65-75% of the cost of education is something other than teachers' salaries. I've got to think that's an indication that something is very, very wrong. Even accounting for the depreciation of the building and its contents, I wonder if quite a lot of money is being spent on something other than education...
- ec109685 10y ago
  Average class size is way less than 30 to 40: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass1112_2013314_t1s_007.asp https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass1112_2013314_t1s...
  - mikekchar 10y ago
    Hmm... Very interesting. Much different than the class sizes I remember from my one and only year of education in the US. Also, very nice if true. I can't quite understand the data, though. In the description for self-contained and departmentalised the percentages don't even come close to adding up to 100%. Are there other styles of teaching whose data is not represented on this chart?
maverick_iceman 10y ago
Easy solution: stop social services for everybody.
- bayesian_horse 10y ago
  Are you sure that is cheaper?
dbg31415 10y ago
Always good to cite your sources. (= * Education Spending Per Student by State || http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-education-spending-per-pupil-data.html http://www.governing.com/gov-data/education-data/state-educa... I find this really interesting -- I wasn't able to figure out how to subtract transportation costs from the spend per pupil, probably good to also normalize school building maintenance costs where labor is more expensive. So this is certainly from the hip... If we assume the folks at US News did an OK job of ranking education performance... * How States Compare in the 2016 Best High Schools Rankings | Best High Schools | US News || http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/articles/how-states-compare http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/articles/h... Then we see that the states that were able to get the most bang for their buck were: 1) Utah 2) Florida 3) California 4) Nevada 5) Colorado 6) Arizona 7) Oklahoma 8) Georgia 9) Texas 10) Kentucky It'd be curious to look for similarities between these states. I suspect America is too diverse of a place that we won't find a one-size-fits-all answer to education. Vouchers may help some states, hurt others. Religious participation and divorce rates may help some states but not matter at all in others. Raw spend may matter (seems to help CT and DC), or not at all (seems to not matter much in AK or WY -- this is where factoring out transportation and school maintenance seems like it'd be important). Utah spends less than any state and still has exceptional performance... wonder if it scales... can you add more money to improve or does money not even matter?
bayesian_horse 10y ago
Making sure the next generation doesn't grow up destitute and uneducated is hardly even an altruistic goal. These children should be left out of this discussion. They didn't even have the opportunity to choose not to inconvenience you by their existence. They are US citizens just like you are. If there is a net transfer of tax dollars to children growing up in poverty - and there is preciously little of that - then all to the better.

pranjalv123 10y ago

Except immigrants also increase demand.

chillacy 10y ago
They increase demand for products (certain products that are local only to the destination country, not things they would buy anyways like a cellphone), but not jobs. Increased workforce will increase supply of labor much more than it will increase demand for that labor (which I can't think of a direct route which would cause that, except for general economic boom leading to more businesses, but that's pretty indirect)
- bayesian_horse 10y ago
  That is a bunch of completely unproven assumptions. Of course immigrants increase the demand for labor. Even the illegal ones. You can't think of a direct route? Try the obvious ones: Who cuts their hair? Who fixes their car? Sells them groceries? It's even more obvious for legal immigrants. What's wrong with a general economic boom?
  - chillacy 10y ago
    Great for haircut salons: you get cheaper labor with an increased labor pool and you get more customers! Not great for the previous employees of the haircut salon. I'm not convinced that the increased demand for haircuts will outpace the wage loss that came with increased competition for that job.

bayesian_horse 10y ago

This simplified notion of "Supply and demand" does not work with immigration and labor. The obvious solution to your problem of lower wages would be to legalize illegal immigrants to give them equal rights and empower them to seek higher wages.

coldtea 10y ago
This wouldn't work either, because the majority of immigrants will still be unskilled, not speaking the language well etc, starting as dirt poor and having to work hand to mouth, and thus unable to "seek higher wages" for other reasons too aside from their illegal status.
- heurist 10y ago
  In that case they'd have to go back to their home countries to find work.

coldtea 10y ago

Yes, but the average commenter on the site (or anybody middle class and above) will rarely be impacted negatively by this, and if anything they'll have some benefits from the cheaper low-skill labor available to them (e.g. for their companies, construction, services, etc). As for the low-skill working class people affected, the general sentiment is screw them. Or BS jokes like "if an immigrant that doesn't even speak the language can take your job, you didn't deserve it in the first place" (as if all jobs are dependent on verbal skills, e.g. mining, cleaning, gardening, construction work, etc). In the same vein, if visas for developers counted in the millions, there would be riots all over Silicon Valley, and angry letters to politicians...