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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 highe

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.
      - dnomad 8y ago
        > With the detachment of wage growth from economic growth in recent decades And you think immigrants are responsible for this? Or are they simply being used as a sacrificial scapegoat because nobody wants to address the raging inequality in the West?
        flukus 8y ago
        > And you think immigrants are responsible for this? Entirely? No. Partially? Yes. Most notably immigration has a huge impact on housing and the ever increasing demand for it. This alone is responsible for much of the fall in living standards.
        dnomad 8y ago
        > Most notably immigration has a huge impact on housing and the ever increasing demand for it. Do you have any evidence at all for this claim or is this just something you made up out of thin air? I mean, no offense, but I remember when Brexiters were claiming the same [1] earlier this year and it was quickly proven to be nonsense. Maybe you can do a better job? [1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/13/housing-minister-dominic-raab-defends-claim-of-immigration-pushing-up-house-prices https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/13/housing-mini...
        flukus 8y ago
        > Do you have any evidence at all for this claim or is this just something you made up out of thin air? I need a citation for "more people == more housing demand"? I really don't care what academics say about the cause because they're divorced from reality. The reality is that as a single, well payed software developer with no kids I'm now on the downward slope of paying off the mortgage of my small studio apartment. My father at the same age had 2 kids, a stay at home wife and was on the downward slope of paying off their 4 bedroom house with a huge yard and a pool, all on a minimum wage job. Yet economists keep telling us how much richer this generation is.
    - adwn 8y ago
      > The problem with the anti-immigrant zealots is they never provide any evidence for their paranoid fantasies about immigrants increasing unemployment or supressing wages. Ironically, your post also contains zero evidence for your claims.
    - chrchang523 8y ago
      The overwhelming majority of people who still claim in 2018 that "anti-immigrant zealots never provide any evidence" are either knowingly lying (disengaging and pretending not to remember when they do encounter an intelligent objector) or have Bayesian priors amounting to religious zealotry which make it impossible for them to recognize evidence for what it is. As an example, I posted the following a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384668 ): "Private business was just one of several examples I gave to illustrate principles which hold across a wide range of scales of human organization. It is straightforward to verify that they don't stop holding at nation-scale. A good place to start is Lee Kuan Yew, who's both one of the only leaders in history to preside over the entire transition from Third World to First World for millions of people, and an architect of what's currently the most open immigration policy among Chinese-majority states. Singapore is a multicultural place whose government is widely acknowledged to have one of the best technocratic track records in the world, and they spent considerable effort on trying to get immigration policy right, iterating through alternatives while deliberately taking a popularity hit; what were their conclusions? Or what are the odds, under your stated worldview, that two of the closest things to actual open borders existing in 2018 are (i) the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, which lets almost anyone stay as long as they can support themselves ...but ranges from 74 to 81 degrees N latitude, and (ii) the United Arab Emirates, which has more than five times as many expats as actual citizens, the largest number from India ...but ruthlessly maintains a two-tiered society, where even people who were born in the UAE and have lived there their entire lives are exceedingly unlikely to be granted citizenship unless they are Arab? Contrary to claims that nothing like open borders has ever been tried, the existence of cases like this make it abundantly clear that this area of policy space has already been subject to substantial exploration. And every surviving result has an obvious and unusual force that does something similar to what traditional immigration controls accomplish in most countries, such as Svalbard's -40C winters. This is, to put it mildly, not a likely result if traditional immigration controls no longer have a useful function." It may not be the final word on this subject. But it certainly points out several relevant, usually-neglected pieces of evidence. What did I get from my conversation partner as a reward? A downvote and no further response, of course; they weren't actually interested in truth or dialogue. The more I see this, the more strongly I advise everyone else to prepare to do whatever is necessary for self-defense against these people.
greeneggs 8y ago
This does not seem obvious to me. For example, imagine if you overnight doubled the US population. Would wages go down? Well, overnight you would also double the economy and double demand for just about every kind of work, from hairdressers to security guards. What's the overall effect? (And you are talking about just 3.5%, not 100%.) Here's one classic study on the effect: David Card, "The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market" (1990), http://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/mariel-impact.pdf http://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/mariel-impact.pdf Quoting from the abstract: "…This paper describes the effect of the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 on the Miami labor market. The Mariel immigrants increased the Miami labor force by 7%, and the percentage increase in labor supply to less-skilled occupations and industries was even greater because most of the immigrants were relatively unskilled. Nevertheless, the Mariel influx appears to have had virtually no effect on the wages or unemployment rates of less-skilled workers…" That's a rapid influx of 7% of Miami's population! But the effect isn't obvious to economists, either, and you can find people arguing both sides. This is a fairly balanced article: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/04/541321716/fact-check-have-low-skilled-immigrants-taken-american-jobs https://www.npr.org/2017/08/04/541321716/fact-check-have-low...
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  The effect of a doubling of the population depends entirely on who the new people were. Are they native speaking engineers, doctors and pop stars? Or illiterate and sickly old people? One thing is for sure, housing prices would skyrocket!
  - 3x 8y ago
    > One thing is for sure, housing prices would skyrocket! Sure, in the hypothetical of instantaneously doubling the population without any time for the market to adjust for increased demand. But if the population doubles over the course of 30 years? That's only about 11 million people a year, the market would expect and adjust to the influx of people easily. Governments would also ideally be devising initiatives and changing policy to promote affordable housing. The high cost of housing in the US is its own issue anyway.
- 8y ago
dgut 8y ago
Mention it anyways, that is don't ever hesitate to post your opinion. Those who can't tolerate the topic aren't worth your argument/time but a lot of people wouldn't mind. Including me, an immigrant myself (not to the US though).
some_account 8y ago
I'm Sweden we are labeled as racists if we talk about it, so downvoting seems minor :)
- CobrastanJorji 8y ago
  Didn't y'all just give the political party with neo-Nazi roots 63 seats in the Riksdag a few days ago? The labeling might be because at least some of the people talking a lot about immigrants are racists.
noonespecial 8y ago
Nothing with so dense a web of causes and effects can be obvious. Might fewer low skilled workers driving the wages higher for those remaining also drive up the costs of the goods and services they produce? Would their new higher wages offset those higher prices or might they be worse off than before? I don't know. No one else does either.
sidstling 8y ago
It’s more complicated than that though. In Denmark where I live, we have trouble staffing certain industry jobs. Jobs like gutting, freezing and packing fish or general slaughter houses. It used to be that these were low paying jobs, packed with immigrants. Since you need a social security number to work, and we’re rather good at finding people who cheat the system, illegal immigration workers isn’t really a thing in factories. But the system and legalization was still exploited so paying immigrants less was possible. Anyway eventually regulation caught up and ended the low pay loopholes. So now a job at those factories pays half a million kroner a year, or more than I earn as a senior IT-architect. As a result a lot of our slaughtering houses moved production and enrichment out of the country, but the really interesting thing is the fishing factories. They couldn’t move or outsource production because they need to be located close to where the fish are caught. Despite the pay hike they still can’t hire enough people without relying on immigration. It turned out that nobody wanted those jobs, even when they pay really well. Ps. Im not sure what fishing factories and slaughtering houses are called in English but I hope you get the point.
- joelhoffman 8y ago
  Slaughterhouse is the right word. I'm not sure what you mean by a fishing factory but I suppose it would be a fish packing plant?
- toofy 8y ago
  > Anyway eventually regulation caught up and ended the low pay loopholes. So now a job at those factories pays half a million kroner a year, or more than I earn as a senior IT-architect. I think this is an important point that many people seem to gloss over when discussing what humans _deserve_ to be paid. Many believe the uniqueness of a skill set or how much physical stress is inherent to a position should be the only factors which increase a salary. But the point you highlight here says that the amount of soul-crushing misery a position entails should also play a significant role when determining salaries. It seems that in many countries, companies can get away with paying soul-crushing positions so terribly because so many people are coerced into these jobs--forced to choose between incredibly soul-crushing, low paying positions or watch their families starve, become homeless, not be able to afford medical care etc... Which leads me to wonder if there are any societal changes we could make in order to nudge salaries to reflect when a job is mentally abusive. Similar to how pay typically reflects when a job is physically abusive. I'm guessing Denmark has a decent safety net which forces companies to actually factor in mental abuse of a position when they're formulating salaries which ensures their citizens are compensated accordingly?

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.
    - dnomad 8y ago
      > With the detachment of wage growth from economic growth in recent decades And you think immigrants are responsible for this? Or are they simply being used as a sacrificial scapegoat because nobody wants to address the raging inequality in the West?
      - flukus 8y ago
        > And you think immigrants are responsible for this? Entirely? No. Partially? Yes. Most notably immigration has a huge impact on housing and the ever increasing demand for it. This alone is responsible for much of the fall in living standards.
        dnomad 8y ago
        > Most notably immigration has a huge impact on housing and the ever increasing demand for it. Do you have any evidence at all for this claim or is this just something you made up out of thin air? I mean, no offense, but I remember when Brexiters were claiming the same [1] earlier this year and it was quickly proven to be nonsense. Maybe you can do a better job? [1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/13/housing-minister-dominic-raab-defends-claim-of-immigration-pushing-up-house-prices https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/13/housing-mini...
        flukus 8y ago
        > Do you have any evidence at all for this claim or is this just something you made up out of thin air? I need a citation for "more people == more housing demand"? I really don't care what academics say about the cause because they're divorced from reality. The reality is that as a single, well payed software developer with no kids I'm now on the downward slope of paying off the mortgage of my small studio apartment. My father at the same age had 2 kids, a stay at home wife and was on the downward slope of paying off their 4 bedroom house with a huge yard and a pool, all on a minimum wage job. Yet economists keep telling us how much richer this generation is.
  - adwn 8y ago
    > The problem with the anti-immigrant zealots is they never provide any evidence for their paranoid fantasies about immigrants increasing unemployment or supressing wages. Ironically, your post also contains zero evidence for your claims.
  - chrchang523 8y ago
    The overwhelming majority of people who still claim in 2018 that "anti-immigrant zealots never provide any evidence" are either knowingly lying (disengaging and pretending not to remember when they do encounter an intelligent objector) or have Bayesian priors amounting to religious zealotry which make it impossible for them to recognize evidence for what it is. As an example, I posted the following a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384668 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384668 ): "Private business was just one of several examples I gave to illustrate principles which hold across a wide range of scales of human organization. It is straightforward to verify that they don't stop holding at nation-scale. A good place to start is Lee Kuan Yew, who's both one of the only leaders in history to preside over the entire transition from Third World to First World for millions of people, and an architect of what's currently the most open immigration policy among Chinese-majority states. Singapore is a multicultural place whose government is widely acknowledged to have one of the best technocratic track records in the world, and they spent considerable effort on trying to get immigration policy right, iterating through alternatives while deliberately taking a popularity hit; what were their conclusions? Or what are the odds, under your stated worldview, that two of the closest things to actual open borders existing in 2018 are (i) the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, which lets almost anyone stay as long as they can support themselves ...but ranges from 74 to 81 degrees N latitude, and (ii) the United Arab Emirates, which has more than five times as many expats as actual citizens, the largest number from India ...but ruthlessly maintains a two-tiered society, where even people who were born in the UAE and have lived there their entire lives are exceedingly unlikely to be granted citizenship unless they are Arab? Contrary to claims that nothing like open borders has ever been tried, the existence of cases like this make it abundantly clear that this area of policy space has already been subject to substantial exploration. And every surviving result has an obvious and unusual force that does something similar to what traditional immigration controls accomplish in most countries, such as Svalbard's -40C winters. This is, to put it mildly, not a likely result if traditional immigration controls no longer have a useful function." It may not be the final word on this subject. But it certainly points out several relevant, usually-neglected pieces of evidence. What did I get from my conversation partner as a reward? A downvote and no further response, of course; they weren't actually interested in truth or dialogue. The more I see this, the more strongly I advise everyone else to prepare to do whatever is necessary for self-defense against these people.

greeneggs 8y ago

This does not seem obvious to me. For example, imagine if you overnight doubled the US population. Would wages go down? Well, overnight you would also double the economy and double demand for just about every kind of work, from hairdressers to security guards. What's the overall effect? (And you are talking about just 3.5%, not 100%.) Here's one classic study on the effect: David Card, "The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market" (1990), http://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/mariel-impact.pdf http://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/mariel-impact.pdf Quoting from the abstract: "…This paper describes the effect of the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 on the Miami labor market. The Mariel immigrants increased the Miami labor force by 7%, and the percentage increase in labor supply to less-skilled occupations and industries was even greater because most of the immigrants were relatively unskilled. Nevertheless, the Mariel influx appears to have had virtually no effect on the wages or unemployment rates of less-skilled workers…" That's a rapid influx of 7% of Miami's population! But the effect isn't obvious to economists, either, and you can find people arguing both sides. This is a fairly balanced article: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/04/541321716/fact-check-have-low-skilled-immigrants-taken-american-jobs https://www.npr.org/2017/08/04/541321716/fact-check-have-low...

BurningFrog 8y ago
The effect of a doubling of the population depends entirely on who the new people were. Are they native speaking engineers, doctors and pop stars? Or illiterate and sickly old people? One thing is for sure, housing prices would skyrocket!
- 3x 8y ago
  > One thing is for sure, housing prices would skyrocket! Sure, in the hypothetical of instantaneously doubling the population without any time for the market to adjust for increased demand. But if the population doubles over the course of 30 years? That's only about 11 million people a year, the market would expect and adjust to the influx of people easily. Governments would also ideally be devising initiatives and changing policy to promote affordable housing. The high cost of housing in the US is its own issue anyway.
8y ago

dgut 8y ago

Mention it anyways, that is don't ever hesitate to post your opinion. Those who can't tolerate the topic aren't worth your argument/time but a lot of people wouldn't mind. Including me, an immigrant myself (not to the US though).

some_account 8y ago

I'm Sweden we are labeled as racists if we talk about it, so downvoting seems minor :)

CobrastanJorji 8y ago
Didn't y'all just give the political party with neo-Nazi roots 63 seats in the Riksdag a few days ago? The labeling might be because at least some of the people talking a lot about immigrants are racists.

noonespecial 8y ago

Nothing with so dense a web of causes and effects can be obvious. Might fewer low skilled workers driving the wages higher for those remaining also drive up the costs of the goods and services they produce? Would their new higher wages offset those higher prices or might they be worse off than before? I don't know. No one else does either.

sidstling 8y ago

It’s more complicated than that though. In Denmark where I live, we have trouble staffing certain industry jobs. Jobs like gutting, freezing and packing fish or general slaughter houses. It used to be that these were low paying jobs, packed with immigrants. Since you need a social security number to work, and we’re rather good at finding people who cheat the system, illegal immigration workers isn’t really a thing in factories. But the system and legalization was still exploited so paying immigrants less was possible. Anyway eventually regulation caught up and ended the low pay loopholes. So now a job at those factories pays half a million kroner a year, or more than I earn as a senior IT-architect. As a result a lot of our slaughtering houses moved production and enrichment out of the country, but the really interesting thing is the fishing factories. They couldn’t move or outsource production because they need to be located close to where the fish are caught. Despite the pay hike they still can’t hire enough people without relying on immigration. It turned out that nobody wanted those jobs, even when they pay really well. Ps. Im not sure what fishing factories and slaughtering houses are called in English but I hope you get the point.

joelhoffman 8y ago
Slaughterhouse is the right word. I'm not sure what you mean by a fishing factory but I suppose it would be a fish packing plant?
toofy 8y ago
> Anyway eventually regulation caught up and ended the low pay loopholes. So now a job at those factories pays half a million kroner a year, or more than I earn as a senior IT-architect. I think this is an important point that many people seem to gloss over when discussing what humans _deserve_ to be paid. Many believe the uniqueness of a skill set or how much physical stress is inherent to a position should be the only factors which increase a salary. But the point you highlight here says that the amount of soul-crushing misery a position entails should also play a significant role when determining salaries. It seems that in many countries, companies can get away with paying soul-crushing positions so terribly because so many people are coerced into these jobs--forced to choose between incredibly soul-crushing, low paying positions or watch their families starve, become homeless, not be able to afford medical care etc... Which leads me to wonder if there are any societal changes we could make in order to nudge salaries to reflect when a job is mentally abusive. Similar to how pay typically reflects when a job is physically abusive. I'm guessing Denmark has a decent safety net which forces companies to actually factor in mental abuse of a position when they're formulating salaries which ensures their citizens are compensated accordingly?