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Love it when people compile montages of article headlines that circulate every year to encourage the importation of more cheap labor. Here's a recent favorite

Love it when people compile montages of article headlines that circulate every year to encourage the importation of more cheap labor. Here's a recent favorite byline: "America’s labor shortage is approaching epidemic proportions, and it could be employers who end up paying [their workers more]. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/05/the-us-labor-shortage-is-reaching-a-critical-point.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/05/the-us-labor-shortage-is-rea... Epidemic proportions!

SketchySeaBeast 8y ago
>> and it could be employers who end up paying [their workers more] What a bizarre statement. Who else would pay them more? And why is that framed like a bad thing?
adventured 8y ago
You get those incredible dueling headlines from the same media outlets of how wages are not rising fast enough, and how we need to have open borders allowing in unlimited low skill, low wage labor. Who will pick the strawberries if we don't import ten million low skill laborers in the next decade? The Koch brothers must have their cheap labor or their industrial profits will suffer. Wages must be carefully constrained or inflation might tick up a bit after a decade of the Fed proclaiming they desperately want more inflation (of course what they actually mean by inflation risk is that business profit margins will take a hit and prices might climb some - if the businesses have pricing power - due to the bottom half of workers earning more). And that income stagnation at the median? It's amazing what happens when the middle class moves up [1], your natural population growth drops toward zero, but you import tens of millions of low skill, cheap laborers over 30-40 years: your median doesn't move up because you're treading water by offsetting everyone that moved up. [1] https://i.imgur.com/IOgZLDc.png https://i.imgur.com/IOgZLDc.png

SketchySeaBeast 8y ago

>> and it could be employers who end up paying [their workers more] What a bizarre statement. Who else would pay them more? And why is that framed like a bad thing?

adventured 8y ago

You get those incredible dueling headlines from the same media outlets of how wages are not rising fast enough, and how we need to have open borders allowing in unlimited low skill, low wage labor. Who will pick the strawberries if we don't import ten million low skill laborers in the next decade? The Koch brothers must have their cheap labor or their industrial profits will suffer. Wages must be carefully constrained or inflation might tick up a bit after a decade of the Fed proclaiming they desperately want more inflation (of course what they actually mean by inflation risk is that business profit margins will take a hit and prices might climb some - if the businesses have pricing power - due to the bottom half of workers earning more). And that income stagnation at the median? It's amazing what happens when the middle class moves up [1], your natural population growth drops toward zero, but you import tens of millions of low skill, cheap laborers over 30-40 years: your median doesn't move up because you're treading water by offsetting everyone that moved up. [1] https://i.imgur.com/IOgZLDc.png https://i.imgur.com/IOgZLDc.png