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Wage growth would help, but for some reason, these articles never even mention immigration. The scale of immigration both legal and illegal I believe has the gr

Wage growth would help, but for some reason, these articles never even mention immigration. The scale of immigration both legal and illegal I believe has the greatest impact on the lowest sectors of society. The lack of discussion on the impact so many potential new workers is having on wage growth leads one to think they believe labor cost is the one thing immune to the law of supply and demand.

nickthemagicman 8y ago
Illegal immigrants are 1% of the population in the U.S. It's used as a way to divide people rather than an actual serious issue.
- tosser00001 8y ago
  Pew Reasearch puts the number at 3.5%, which I think is quite high enough to impact growth. But downward wage pressure at the lowest sectors comes from both legal and illegal immigration. It would be interesting to see what at short term lowering of immigration would have on wage growth.
  - mc32 8y ago
    3.5% is a lot of pressure on housing --which is quite inelastic in demand but also very slow to respond to increased demand.
    - candiodari 8y ago
      Furthermore those 3.5% are not divided randomly. On the lowest rung of society, they're at least 50%. The higher you go the lower the percentage, and it drops off pretty fast.
      - toofy 8y ago
        Sorry, I'm confused by your statement, are you saying "at least" 50% of the lower class are immigrants?
        candiodari 8y ago
        No, I mean when it comes to the lowest of the low jobs, like hotel maid in terribly run bad hotel or garbage man, illegal immigrants represent almost a majority. I don't have exact figures so I'm using 50% like "about half". I suspect though that it's only about half because some of them managed to legalize themselves, and in reality in these very bad jobs there's actually even more than that.
  - acchow 8y ago
    Aren't a lot of these immigrants doing highly skilled and highly paid labor? They don't depress wage growth for low paying jobs. And they actually increase demand for their products.
    - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
      You're conflating two groups. There are legal immigrants who stay, generally under the sponsorship of a company, and there are illegal immigrants who either come by illegally crossing the border, or by overstaying a legally obtained visa. Legal immigrants do tend to be highly skilled and relatively highly paid, though their wages are often lower than citizen workers in the same field - which can depress wages overall. Illegal immigrants by contrast tend to be involved in low skill and low pay labor, often done under the table. Personally, I have nothing at all against the illegal sort. Day laborers, for instance, tend to be great workers and good people, happy to put in a hard day's work for a $50 and some good meals. At the same time though, I have to consider that this is really distorting the economy since it drags down wages for all people willing to do this work to that level, which is not really fair to people that want to make a living doing this work but want a higher standard of living, to raise a family, etc.
    - kart23 8y ago
      Not illegals. You realize that as an illegal you cannot legally work in the states right? You have no documentation, so anywhere paying decent wages would never hire you, because it's illegal and would open them up to fines and other legal issues. The only places that are going to hire you are going to do it under the table, pay you extremely low wages, and basically take advantage of you because you have no power.
tosser00001 8y ago
It’s interesting the immigration cannot even be mentioned without getting down voted. It seems obvious to me that fewer low skill workers would result in higher wages for those who could most benefit from it.
- bb88 8y ago
  Please don't complain about being downvoted. This isn't slashdot.
  - jjoonathan 8y ago
    The suppression of dialogue surrounding immigration far exceeds downvotes in scope and severity. In fact, the suggestion that tosser00001's main point had anything to do with silly internet points is a minimization/redirection tactic that is itself a more important instance of the very thing being complained about.
    - dnomad 8y ago
      > The suppression of dialogue surrounding immigration far exceeds downvotes in scope and severity. The problem with the anti-immigrant zealots is they never provide any evidence for their paranoid fantasies about immigrants increasing unemployment or supressing wages. People who actually study the economic impact of immigration in the West have generally concluded it has insignificant impact or improves the economy. What do you do with people who, with absolutely zero evidence, continue to blame immigrants/Jews/aliens? You downvote and move on.
      - flukus 8y ago
        > concluded it has insignificant impact or improves the economy Just because it improves the economy doesn't mean it's improved the lives of all people in it. With the detachment of wage growth from economic growth in recent decades you can probably expect people to stop caring about what's good for the economy altogether pretty soon, economic growth is just an abstract number disassociated from the reality of most.
sdinsn 8y ago
I'd argue that legal immigration has the greatest impact on higher sectors of society- such as salaries in software / IT. This can be fixed by raising the minimum pay for H1Bs. I'd believe that illegal immigration has a incredibly small effect overall.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  The illegals are all picking strawberries for below minimum wage so we don't have the bear the true costs of our food. Remove them and there would be serious repercussions for those at the lower strata of society.
  - fzeroracer 8y ago
    As you've mentioned the real cost of food and farming in the US is effectively heavily subsidized by the fact that many of said farms employ illegal immigrants for labor, both because they refuse to pay minimum wage and because Americans as a whole seem to refuse to do said jobs. Legal immigration has a comparatively small effect due to the fact that they're part of the skilled labor force and generally fill gaps in our society. The number of people actually holding H1Bs is so small that I find it hard to believe they have any major pull on the various sectors outside of the few firms that are known to be abusing the system. Fixing the system in a humane way that also doesn't blow up the lower classes is a herculean task.
    - chrisbennet 8y ago
      If we raised farm labor wages by 40% it would cost the consumer less than $25 a year. ”For a typical household, a 40 percent increase in farm labor costs translates into a four percent increase in retail prices (0.30 farm share of retail prices x 0.33 farm labor share of farm revenue = 10 percent, farm labor costs rise 40 percent, and 0.4 x 10 = 3.6 percent). If farm wages rose 40 percent, and the increase were passed on fully to consumers, average spending on fresh fruits and vegetables would rise by about $21 a year (4 percent x $530 = $21). Giving seasonal farm workers a 40 percent wage increase, on the other hand, would raise their average earnings from $11,720 for 1,000 hours of work to $16,400, lifting the average worker above the federal poverty line of $11,770 for an individual in 2015.” https://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=2005 https://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=2005
acchow 8y ago
You're ignoring the demand side. Immigrants also increase demand. For everything.
- dgut 8y ago
  Do they? By how much? Immigrants have usually low wages. Anyways, in Western Europe, the increased demand (which is probably smaller than in the US), those things are easily canceled by the added costs to public healthcare + social benefits.
  - Joeri 8y ago
    In belgium the rising healthcare cost is almost entirely due to an aging population. To take care of those elderly you need nurses and care workers, 46000 extra per year for the coming decade. Meanwhile the schools only graduate 5000 per year, due to lack of interest by the native population because of the odd hours in nursing. The only way they’ve found to bridge the gap and take care of the elderly is bringing over people from the phillipines, because it turns out this problem exists across europe (aging population = care gap). Those immigrants are not taking anyone’s job away, they earn a decent wage and they’re doing a net positive contribution through work, taxes and commerce. That’s an anecdote but there are plenty more like that. All of which is to say that the story the right pushes about immigrants being bad for the economy is just a story and doesn’t necessarily fit the facts.
    - burfog 8y ago
      There is "lack of interest by the native population" only because wages have been pushed down by people from the Philippines. Even with odd hours, people will gladly do the job if the pay is good. The elderly, with failing ears and minds, have enough trouble understanding the speech of the native population. Subjecting your elderly to nurses that can't be understood at all is elder abuse.
      - ahakki 8y ago
        > Even with odd hours, people will gladly do the job if the pay is good. Definitly true. However good pay costs a lot of money, so less care workers can be hired with the current budget. Either you have to spend more money or accept a reduction in the level of care.
lalos 8y ago
Have you checked minimum wage vs inflation chart? Seems that not having a minimum wage that goes up yearly to catch up to inflation has the biggest impact in wage growth. There are bigger fish to fry rather than speculate on the impact of immigration (but not as easy to sell to angry constituents), the current population is at ~320 million and you receive ~1 million immigrants a year, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and let's more than double it and say 5 million. That represents 1.5% unwanted growth via immigration, I have my doubts that a change so small can have an impact so big on an economic system.
- Mizza 8y ago
  I think that this is a sleight-of-hand trick that comes up a lot in immigration discussion: he was talking about the small subset of the population that is most directly affected by the change, you switched the focus of the impact to the entire economic system. If you only look at the bottom 10% of society where the job competition is occurring, your 1.5% becomes 15% - annually! It's staggering. Immigration applies downward pressure on lower/middle-lower labor classes and harms the power of unions. I don't blame the immigrants who want to go where the jobs pay more - it's the smart thing for them to do - the blame here lies 100% on the corporations who exploit this (Tyson foods, etc.) and the politicians they ~~bribe~~contribute funds to.
  - lalos 8y ago
    The main point was inflation and wages. He mentions that "The scale of immigration both legal and illegal I believe has the greatest impact on the lowest sectors of society.", I doubt the impact is greater than the stagnation of wages against inflation where $2 min wage in 1968 is equivalent to almost $11 of today's dollars [0]. Current min wage is at $7.25. Do the immigrants vote for maintaining the minimum wage at the current level or where am I getting lost? I'm quite sure econ 101 says that if the salary goes up there will be more people willing to accept the job. Until that happens, of course a low-skilled immigrant will take that $7.25 hour job that no one wants. He will barely survive (while making sacrifices in the quality of life) and yes the corporation will happily accept it since nobody wants to do that work for that wage and people want low prices. [0] https://sc.cnbcfm.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/files/2016/07/19/min-wage-inflation.PNG https://sc.cnbcfm.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/files/...
anovikov 8y ago
The scale of immigration has definitely been whole lot higher in 1960s, not to mention 1920s of course when it was free and open for everyone who could pass a basic medical check.
partycoder 8y ago
The cost of one AGM-114 Hellfire missile is $100,000+. Most likely they will be used to blow up some random guy in the middle east for no reason. The cost of a 1 liter water bag at a hospital is $500. Walmart evaded $70+ billion dollars in tax. They made that money by keeping all their workforce on medicaid. That's where you money is going to, not $6 an hour fruit pickers spending all their money in food.
- candiodari 8y ago
  You say that as if those products are interchangeable. You cannot simply take those missiles away and buy 2000 water bags. The US military, especially, is the largest job and training program anywhere in the world, including the military industrial complex (most of those military contracts, incidentally, do not just come with jobs, but with demands that those companies hire x0000 (3 or 4 zeros) in the states that have the highest poverty levels). I'm not saying it's an ideal occupation (although, hey, Keynes seemed to like it when he was less on guard). So yes, I'd also much prefer them to be building better infrastructure. Or perhaps have a much cheaper postal service. > That's where you money is going to, not $6 an hour fruit pickers spending all their money in food. Perhaps. But the inability of the working poor to pick fruit at $15 an hour IS due to (mostly illegal) fruit pickers.
  - partycoder 8y ago
    It is true that the defense and aerospace sector employs larges amount of people and drives significant amount of R&D. But getting inefficient for them became highly profitable and the F-35 JSF is the prime example of that. Then, if fruit pickers made $20 an hour, you would be getting all of your fruit from Mexico/Central America, and fruit and all products made from it would be more expensive. Other jobs like gardening and landscaping would simply either not be done, or get done by property owners themselves. Now they will be tired, be less productive at work and have less time for their kids, or, see their property value drop while their local crime rate goes up.
    - candiodari 8y ago
neilwilson 8y ago
"Wages in rich countries are determined more by immigration control than anything else, including any minimum wage legislation. How is the immigration maximum determined? Not by the ‘free’ labour market, which, if left alone, will end up replacing 80–90 per cent of native workers with cheaper, and often more productive, immigrants. Immigration is largely settled by politics. So, if you have any residual doubt about the massive role that the government plays in the economy’s free market, then pause to reflect that all our wages are, at root, politically determined.” Chang, Ha-Joon. 2011. 23 Things they Don’t Tell you about Capitalism, Thing 1: There is no such thing as a free market
tfehring 8y ago
The FT had a couple of great podcasts last year ([0], [1]) that discussed the economic and fiscal impacts of immigration. I don't remember all of the details, but the key points were, to the best of my recollection: * Highly skilled/educated immigrants provide a significant boost to economic growth and pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits. I don't recall whether the podcast addressed the impact of these immigrants on the wages of highly skilled native-born workers. * Low-skill immigrants are a net positive in the long term (i.e., once their children grow up) to the economy as a whole, but their net impacts in the short term are somewhat ambiguous, and there is some evidence that they bring about wage decreases for low-skill native-born workers. While that evidence is not completely clear-cut, it seems likely that there's at least some level of impact. There's also evidence suggesting that some of the displaced native-born workers "climb the ladder" into higher-skill, higher-wage positions when this happens, which may mitigate that impact. From what I've read more generally, my impression is that outsourcing has a much larger impact on unskilled workers' wages than immigration does, though I don't have a specific source to support that claim. [0] https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/09/15/2193785/podcast-the-economic-impact-of-immigration/ https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/09/15/2193785/podcast-the-e... [1] https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/11/10/2195727/podcast-kim-rueben-on-the-fiscal-impact-of-immigration/ https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/11/10/2195727/podcast-kim-r...
- sheepmullet 8y ago
  > Low-skill immigrants are a net positive in the long term (i.e., once their children grow up) In a magical hand-wavey manner where we ignore alternatives, obvious consequences, and opportunity costs. They gloss over the reason they are considered a net positive is because almost everyone is. For example their models will show that if the poorest Americans have lots more kids we will collectively be better off. It’s pretty much just economists and the Catholic Church who believe it.

nickthemagicman 8y ago

Illegal immigrants are 1% of the population in the U.S. It's used as a way to divide people rather than an actual serious issue.

tosser00001 8y ago
Pew Reasearch puts the number at 3.5%, which I think is quite high enough to impact growth. But downward wage pressure at the lowest sectors comes from both legal and illegal immigration. It would be interesting to see what at short term lowering of immigration would have on wage growth.
- mc32 8y ago
  3.5% is a lot of pressure on housing --which is quite inelastic in demand but also very slow to respond to increased demand.
  - candiodari 8y ago
    Furthermore those 3.5% are not divided randomly. On the lowest rung of society, they're at least 50%. The higher you go the lower the percentage, and it drops off pretty fast.
    - toofy 8y ago
      Sorry, I'm confused by your statement, are you saying "at least" 50% of the lower class are immigrants?
      - candiodari 8y ago
        No, I mean when it comes to the lowest of the low jobs, like hotel maid in terribly run bad hotel or garbage man, illegal immigrants represent almost a majority. I don't have exact figures so I'm using 50% like "about half". I suspect though that it's only about half because some of them managed to legalize themselves, and in reality in these very bad jobs there's actually even more than that.
- acchow 8y ago
  Aren't a lot of these immigrants doing highly skilled and highly paid labor? They don't depress wage growth for low paying jobs. And they actually increase demand for their products.
  - TangoTrotFox 8y ago
    You're conflating two groups. There are legal immigrants who stay, generally under the sponsorship of a company, and there are illegal immigrants who either come by illegally crossing the border, or by overstaying a legally obtained visa. Legal immigrants do tend to be highly skilled and relatively highly paid, though their wages are often lower than citizen workers in the same field - which can depress wages overall. Illegal immigrants by contrast tend to be involved in low skill and low pay labor, often done under the table. Personally, I have nothing at all against the illegal sort. Day laborers, for instance, tend to be great workers and good people, happy to put in a hard day's work for a $50 and some good meals. At the same time though, I have to consider that this is really distorting the economy since it drags down wages for all people willing to do this work to that level, which is not really fair to people that want to make a living doing this work but want a higher standard of living, to raise a family, etc.
  - kart23 8y ago
    Not illegals. You realize that as an illegal you cannot legally work in the states right? You have no documentation, so anywhere paying decent wages would never hire you, because it's illegal and would open them up to fines and other legal issues. The only places that are going to hire you are going to do it under the table, pay you extremely low wages, and basically take advantage of you because you have no power.

tosser00001 8y ago

It’s interesting the immigration cannot even be mentioned without getting down voted. It seems obvious to me that fewer low skill workers would result in higher wages for those who could most benefit from it.

bb88 8y ago
Please don't complain about being downvoted. This isn't slashdot.
- jjoonathan 8y ago
  The suppression of dialogue surrounding immigration far exceeds downvotes in scope and severity. In fact, the suggestion that tosser00001's main point had anything to do with silly internet points is a minimization/redirection tactic that is itself a more important instance of the very thing being complained about.
  - dnomad 8y ago
    > The suppression of dialogue surrounding immigration far exceeds downvotes in scope and severity. The problem with the anti-immigrant zealots is they never provide any evidence for their paranoid fantasies about immigrants increasing unemployment or supressing wages. People who actually study the economic impact of immigration in the West have generally concluded it has insignificant impact or improves the economy. What do you do with people who, with absolutely zero evidence, continue to blame immigrants/Jews/aliens? You downvote and move on.
    - flukus 8y ago
      > concluded it has insignificant impact or improves the economy Just because it improves the economy doesn't mean it's improved the lives of all people in it. With the detachment of wage growth from economic growth in recent decades you can probably expect people to stop caring about what's good for the economy altogether pretty soon, economic growth is just an abstract number disassociated from the reality of most.

sdinsn 8y ago

I'd argue that legal immigration has the greatest impact on higher sectors of society- such as salaries in software / IT. This can be fixed by raising the minimum pay for H1Bs. I'd believe that illegal immigration has a incredibly small effect overall.

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
The illegals are all picking strawberries for below minimum wage so we don't have the bear the true costs of our food. Remove them and there would be serious repercussions for those at the lower strata of society.
- fzeroracer 8y ago
  As you've mentioned the real cost of food and farming in the US is effectively heavily subsidized by the fact that many of said farms employ illegal immigrants for labor, both because they refuse to pay minimum wage and because Americans as a whole seem to refuse to do said jobs. Legal immigration has a comparatively small effect due to the fact that they're part of the skilled labor force and generally fill gaps in our society. The number of people actually holding H1Bs is so small that I find it hard to believe they have any major pull on the various sectors outside of the few firms that are known to be abusing the system. Fixing the system in a humane way that also doesn't blow up the lower classes is a herculean task.
  - chrisbennet 8y ago
    If we raised farm labor wages by 40% it would cost the consumer less than $25 a year. ”For a typical household, a 40 percent increase in farm labor costs translates into a four percent increase in retail prices (0.30 farm share of retail prices x 0.33 farm labor share of farm revenue = 10 percent, farm labor costs rise 40 percent, and 0.4 x 10 = 3.6 percent). If farm wages rose 40 percent, and the increase were passed on fully to consumers, average spending on fresh fruits and vegetables would rise by about $21 a year (4 percent x $530 = $21). Giving seasonal farm workers a 40 percent wage increase, on the other hand, would raise their average earnings from $11,720 for 1,000 hours of work to $16,400, lifting the average worker above the federal poverty line of $11,770 for an individual in 2015.” https://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=2005 https://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=2005

acchow 8y ago

You're ignoring the demand side. Immigrants also increase demand. For everything.

dgut 8y ago
Do they? By how much? Immigrants have usually low wages. Anyways, in Western Europe, the increased demand (which is probably smaller than in the US), those things are easily canceled by the added costs to public healthcare + social benefits.
- Joeri 8y ago
  In belgium the rising healthcare cost is almost entirely due to an aging population. To take care of those elderly you need nurses and care workers, 46000 extra per year for the coming decade. Meanwhile the schools only graduate 5000 per year, due to lack of interest by the native population because of the odd hours in nursing. The only way they’ve found to bridge the gap and take care of the elderly is bringing over people from the phillipines, because it turns out this problem exists across europe (aging population = care gap). Those immigrants are not taking anyone’s job away, they earn a decent wage and they’re doing a net positive contribution through work, taxes and commerce. That’s an anecdote but there are plenty more like that. All of which is to say that the story the right pushes about immigrants being bad for the economy is just a story and doesn’t necessarily fit the facts.
  - burfog 8y ago
    There is "lack of interest by the native population" only because wages have been pushed down by people from the Philippines. Even with odd hours, people will gladly do the job if the pay is good. The elderly, with failing ears and minds, have enough trouble understanding the speech of the native population. Subjecting your elderly to nurses that can't be understood at all is elder abuse.
    - ahakki 8y ago
      > Even with odd hours, people will gladly do the job if the pay is good. Definitly true. However good pay costs a lot of money, so less care workers can be hired with the current budget. Either you have to spend more money or accept a reduction in the level of care.

lalos 8y ago

Have you checked minimum wage vs inflation chart? Seems that not having a minimum wage that goes up yearly to catch up to inflation has the biggest impact in wage growth. There are bigger fish to fry rather than speculate on the impact of immigration (but not as easy to sell to angry constituents), the current population is at ~320 million and you receive ~1 million immigrants a year, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and let's more than double it and say 5 million. That represents 1.5% unwanted growth via immigration, I have my doubts that a change so small can have an impact so big on an economic system.

Mizza 8y ago
I think that this is a sleight-of-hand trick that comes up a lot in immigration discussion: he was talking about the small subset of the population that is most directly affected by the change, you switched the focus of the impact to the entire economic system. If you only look at the bottom 10% of society where the job competition is occurring, your 1.5% becomes 15% - annually! It's staggering. Immigration applies downward pressure on lower/middle-lower labor classes and harms the power of unions. I don't blame the immigrants who want to go where the jobs pay more - it's the smart thing for them to do - the blame here lies 100% on the corporations who exploit this (Tyson foods, etc.) and the politicians they ~~bribe~~contribute funds to.
- lalos 8y ago
  The main point was inflation and wages. He mentions that "The scale of immigration both legal and illegal I believe has the greatest impact on the lowest sectors of society.", I doubt the impact is greater than the stagnation of wages against inflation where $2 min wage in 1968 is equivalent to almost $11 of today's dollars [0]. Current min wage is at $7.25. Do the immigrants vote for maintaining the minimum wage at the current level or where am I getting lost? I'm quite sure econ 101 says that if the salary goes up there will be more people willing to accept the job. Until that happens, of course a low-skilled immigrant will take that $7.25 hour job that no one wants. He will barely survive (while making sacrifices in the quality of life) and yes the corporation will happily accept it since nobody wants to do that work for that wage and people want low prices. [0] https://sc.cnbcfm.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/files/2016/07/19/min-wage-inflation.PNG https://sc.cnbcfm.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/files/...

anovikov 8y ago

The scale of immigration has definitely been whole lot higher in 1960s, not to mention 1920s of course when it was free and open for everyone who could pass a basic medical check.

partycoder 8y ago

The cost of one AGM-114 Hellfire missile is $100,000+. Most likely they will be used to blow up some random guy in the middle east for no reason. The cost of a 1 liter water bag at a hospital is $500. Walmart evaded $70+ billion dollars in tax. They made that money by keeping all their workforce on medicaid. That's where you money is going to, not $6 an hour fruit pickers spending all their money in food.

candiodari 8y ago
You say that as if those products are interchangeable. You cannot simply take those missiles away and buy 2000 water bags. The US military, especially, is the largest job and training program anywhere in the world, including the military industrial complex (most of those military contracts, incidentally, do not just come with jobs, but with demands that those companies hire x0000 (3 or 4 zeros) in the states that have the highest poverty levels). I'm not saying it's an ideal occupation (although, hey, Keynes seemed to like it when he was less on guard). So yes, I'd also much prefer them to be building better infrastructure. Or perhaps have a much cheaper postal service. > That's where you money is going to, not $6 an hour fruit pickers spending all their money in food. Perhaps. But the inability of the working poor to pick fruit at $15 an hour IS due to (mostly illegal) fruit pickers.
- partycoder 8y ago
  It is true that the defense and aerospace sector employs larges amount of people and drives significant amount of R&D. But getting inefficient for them became highly profitable and the F-35 JSF is the prime example of that. Then, if fruit pickers made $20 an hour, you would be getting all of your fruit from Mexico/Central America, and fruit and all products made from it would be more expensive. Other jobs like gardening and landscaping would simply either not be done, or get done by property owners themselves. Now they will be tired, be less productive at work and have less time for their kids, or, see their property value drop while their local crime rate goes up.
  - candiodari 8y ago

neilwilson 8y ago

"Wages in rich countries are determined more by immigration control than anything else, including any minimum wage legislation. How is the immigration maximum determined? Not by the ‘free’ labour market, which, if left alone, will end up replacing 80–90 per cent of native workers with cheaper, and often more productive, immigrants. Immigration is largely settled by politics. So, if you have any residual doubt about the massive role that the government plays in the economy’s free market, then pause to reflect that all our wages are, at root, politically determined.” Chang, Ha-Joon. 2011. 23 Things they Don’t Tell you about Capitalism, Thing 1: There is no such thing as a free market

tfehring 8y ago

The FT had a couple of great podcasts last year ([0], [1]) that discussed the economic and fiscal impacts of immigration. I don't remember all of the details, but the key points were, to the best of my recollection: * Highly skilled/educated immigrants provide a significant boost to economic growth and pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits. I don't recall whether the podcast addressed the impact of these immigrants on the wages of highly skilled native-born workers. * Low-skill immigrants are a net positive in the long term (i.e., once their children grow up) to the economy as a whole, but their net impacts in the short term are somewhat ambiguous, and there is some evidence that they bring about wage decreases for low-skill native-born workers. While that evidence is not completely clear-cut, it seems likely that there's at least some level of impact. There's also evidence suggesting that some of the displaced native-born workers "climb the ladder" into higher-skill, higher-wage positions when this happens, which may mitigate that impact. From what I've read more generally, my impression is that outsourcing has a much larger impact on unskilled workers' wages than immigration does, though I don't have a specific source to support that claim. [0] https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/09/15/2193785/podcast-the-economic-impact-of-immigration/ https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/09/15/2193785/podcast-the-e... [1] https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/11/10/2195727/podcast-kim-rueben-on-the-fiscal-impact-of-immigration/ https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/11/10/2195727/podcast-kim-r...

sheepmullet 8y ago
> Low-skill immigrants are a net positive in the long term (i.e., once their children grow up) In a magical hand-wavey manner where we ignore alternatives, obvious consequences, and opportunity costs. They gloss over the reason they are considered a net positive is because almost everyone is. For example their models will show that if the poorest Americans have lots more kids we will collectively be better off. It’s pretty much just economists and the Catholic Church who believe it.