10 ms·

Like truck driving, there are many gaps and shortages in the U.S economy that are prime opportunities for immigrants to fill. Either because a majority in some

Like truck driving, there are many gaps and shortages in the U.S economy that are prime opportunities for immigrants to fill. Either because a majority in some way stigmatize the work, or the pay is too low, etc. It's sad to see that immigration has become a taboo in certain parts of the country, as not only do immigrants in general contribute greatly to the economy, but they also impact our culture in significant ways. I expect more profiles like this to spring up in the next few years, as America continues to grow with a low "native" birth rate, immigration will fill the void.

Consultant32452 7y ago
>Either because a majority in some way stigmatize the work, or the pay is too low, etc. The 'pay is too low' bit always bothers me. It implies that we should want to bring in a serf class to do work Americans won't. It's usually in conjunction with some non-white immigrant group, usually Hispanics, which makes it racist to boot. We must not accept arguments about not being able to find workers because the pay is too low. Raise the pay. The wealth and income gaps are bad enough, don't keep pushing down the median wages by bringing in more serf class workers who are willing to accept these wages.
- 40acres 7y ago
  In general I agree with you, but I do believe that there are certain jobs that a majority of Americans simply will not consider. While there is definitely some xenophobic reasons behind this, I think the bulk of it can be explained in economics terms. The average American worker is pretty well educated compared to the rest of the world and has a much higher wage ceiling if they are willing to be selective. We do however need more wage growth in this economy and it's good to see the Fed coming to grips with this and retreating from further interest rate increases.
  - thatcat 7y ago
    What jobs will Americans not consider at a reasonable pay rate?
    - chillwaves 7y ago
      "Reasonable rate" means what? Working in slaughterhouses, working in fields picking produce, working in construction, working the back of house for restaurants, working as housekeepers, working as landscapers or day laborers, working at the car wash. These are all jobs with lots of immigrants. Are you surprised to learn this?
      - Consultant32452 7y ago
        What intrinsic property of immigrants do you believe makes them better suited to work grueling jobs at wages that white people won't accept?
        chillwaves 7y ago
        They accept less pay for the same work. Did you not read my comment? I am having a hard time believing that you did not know this fact before our exchange.
      - thatcat 7y ago
        A reasonable rate means the market rate before you deflate it with cheap labor. I've personally worked 3 of those jobs so yea it's pretty surprising that everyone thinks americans are unwilling to do this stuff.
        chillwaves 7y ago
        The market rate is already in effect.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- davidw 7y ago
  Some of those people risk their lives trying to get here because it's such a huge improvement for them. The reality is that by letting people in, you are vastly improving their lot in life, and all the economic research show it doesn't really hurt anyone here: https://www.cato.org/blog/14-most-common-arguments-against-immigration-why-theyre-wrong https://www.cato.org/blog/14-most-common-arguments-against-i...
  - Consultant32452 7y ago
    I'm okay with this as long as I NEVER hear about wage gap, wealth gap, or growing poverty in the US political discussion again. I never want to hear about increasing entitlements, food stamps, none of it. If we continue this policy, those outcomes are by design. This policy is a charity work for the poor of other countries, paid for by the suppressed wages of the American poor. As long as we can all agree that's the goal, or at least an accepted side effect, I'm willing to go along.
  - prvc 7y ago
    It may be a good deal for the individual confronted with the binary choice, however, that does not change this phenomenon's essential reliance on the exploitation of the poverty of the developing world. The same dynamic is what enables sex tourism and exploitative natural resource extraction, and these are understood to be wrong for the aforementioned reason. Economic incentives cause the owning classes to overlook this in the case of the labor market, however. If there is a shortage of job applicants, raise the offered pay. This is the supposed way that 'free markets' are intended to function, but their putative proponents fight tooth and nail to prevent this from being necessary.
    - davidw 7y ago
      And...keeping people out is going to change that how?
- jacobolus 7y ago
  People raised as rural peasants have a lot more stamina for doing hard agricultural labor than people raised in suburbs without a manual-labor background. Making this observation isn’t “racist”. If immigration were blocked, just raising agricultural workers’ pay wouldn’t be enough to fill all of those jobs. But raising those jobs’ pay (e.g. by raising the federal minimum wage and enforcing it) would be a good idea anyway. Immigrant farm workers should still be paid fair wages.
  - maxerickson 7y ago
    Stamina is the wrong word though. It's willingness or grit or something, not an innate physical characteristic that they picked up from rural poverty. Fun that your edit added "willing" while I was writing this.
    - jacobolus 7y ago
      A lot of it is stamina. Both physical and mental. Rural peasants are really tough in a way that is extremely foreign to suburbanites. My godfather (indigenous peasant in rural Mexico) spent some time in his youth carrying two 50-pound bottles of liquor on his back all day long up and down mountains over a rough trail. I get winded if I try to carry one of those bottles for a block of flat sidewalk. If someone asked me to strap two to a tumpline and hike up a mountain I would call them crazy. He spent other years working on coffee plantations under thieving brutal racist owners. And continued working on his own small plots of land every day up to maybe age 70, even as his body was thoroughly worn out. Now his grandchildren are white-collar professionals. This kind of hard manual labor is as demanding as any high-level sport. It takes years of (mental and physical) training to be able to handle it without falling apart.
      - maxerickson 7y ago
        Do it as much as you can for month and see how far you get. I'm 39 and for the last 6 months I've been doing a job that involves lots of manual labor, it's gotten easier, not harder. I guess I was in relatively decent condition at the start though, if you consider the US average.
mattmanser 7y ago
Immigrants contributing 'greatly' is not an established fact. Here's a meta analysis saying that at best the economic impact is minor, and worse still only the mega-rich benefit, while poor people actually suffer from it: https://www.nber.org/papers/w16736 https://www.nber.org/papers/w16736 If the birth rate is too 'low' then why not pay more benefits for having kids? Or raise the retirement age, as we obviously need to before our pensions all go bankrupt? Worse still, mass-migration is just shunting the problem down the line a generation or two, while most countries using it aren't investing enough in houses, hospitals, infrastructure, etc. to cater for the mass migration.
- keepper 7y ago
  “Immigrants contributing greatly is not an established fact” Funny thing to say about a country made up of immigrants... Let me guess, you’re not from nyc. You should visit Ellis island sometime. It IS the US immigration that has made it what it is now. I always love this part of a speech by Lincoln. “But when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.“
- fzeroracer 7y ago
  The meta analysis you link doesn't seem to quite agree with the way you're framing it. Quoting some of the relevant paragraphs: > The likelihood and magnitude of adverse labor market effects for natives from immigration are substantially weaker than often perceived. Within the large empirical literature looking at the effects of immigration on native employment and wages, most studies find only minor displacement effects even after very large immigrant flows. On the other hand, some more recent studies have found larger effects, and many studies note that the negative effects are concentrated on certain parts of the native population. The parts of the population most typically affected are the less-educated natives or the earlier immigrant cohorts -- that is, those who are the closest substitutes to the new immigrant flow currently experienced by Europe. > Immigration is often viewed as a large fiscal burden for European public finances or as a possible saviour if correctly harnessed. This has been palpable in the recent political atmospheres of France, Italy, and Germany, for instance. Most empirical studies, however, estimate the fiscal impacts of immigration to be very small. There certainly exist large differences across migrant groups in the costs and benefits they cause for a host country; the net impact depends heavily on the migrants age, education, and duration of stay. On average, immigrants appear to have a minor positive net fiscal effect for host countries. Of course, these benefits are not uniformly distributed across the native population and sectors of the economy. The gist being that overall the adverse effects immigration has on the market is much smaller than people perceive, that those most affected are either the prior generation of immigrants or those with less education and that the negative fiscal impacts are negligible at best, with immigrants generally contributing in a positive way.
billfruit 7y ago
I think another field is nursing, where large numbers of Indians are already employed in the US.
fishingisfun 7y ago
the issue is that they dont understand labor politics like the old school blue collar white and black americans do. They end up getting screwed like what happened with the medallion system all over America. I have read many comments about the medallion shake up where people simply said that it wouldnt have happened to white driver owners and that's the truth.

Consultant32452 7y ago

>Either because a majority in some way stigmatize the work, or the pay is too low, etc. The 'pay is too low' bit always bothers me. It implies that we should want to bring in a serf class to do work Americans won't. It's usually in conjunction with some non-white immigrant group, usually Hispanics, which makes it racist to boot. We must not accept arguments about not being able to find workers because the pay is too low. Raise the pay. The wealth and income gaps are bad enough, don't keep pushing down the median wages by bringing in more serf class workers who are willing to accept these wages.

40acres 7y ago
In general I agree with you, but I do believe that there are certain jobs that a majority of Americans simply will not consider. While there is definitely some xenophobic reasons behind this, I think the bulk of it can be explained in economics terms. The average American worker is pretty well educated compared to the rest of the world and has a much higher wage ceiling if they are willing to be selective. We do however need more wage growth in this economy and it's good to see the Fed coming to grips with this and retreating from further interest rate increases.
- thatcat 7y ago
  What jobs will Americans not consider at a reasonable pay rate?
  - chillwaves 7y ago
    "Reasonable rate" means what? Working in slaughterhouses, working in fields picking produce, working in construction, working the back of house for restaurants, working as housekeepers, working as landscapers or day laborers, working at the car wash. These are all jobs with lots of immigrants. Are you surprised to learn this?
    - Consultant32452 7y ago
      What intrinsic property of immigrants do you believe makes them better suited to work grueling jobs at wages that white people won't accept?
      - chillwaves 7y ago
        They accept less pay for the same work. Did you not read my comment? I am having a hard time believing that you did not know this fact before our exchange.
    - thatcat 7y ago
      A reasonable rate means the market rate before you deflate it with cheap labor. I've personally worked 3 of those jobs so yea it's pretty surprising that everyone thinks americans are unwilling to do this stuff.
      - chillwaves 7y ago
        The market rate is already in effect.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
davidw 7y ago
Some of those people risk their lives trying to get here because it's such a huge improvement for them. The reality is that by letting people in, you are vastly improving their lot in life, and all the economic research show it doesn't really hurt anyone here: https://www.cato.org/blog/14-most-common-arguments-against-immigration-why-theyre-wrong https://www.cato.org/blog/14-most-common-arguments-against-i...
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  I'm okay with this as long as I NEVER hear about wage gap, wealth gap, or growing poverty in the US political discussion again. I never want to hear about increasing entitlements, food stamps, none of it. If we continue this policy, those outcomes are by design. This policy is a charity work for the poor of other countries, paid for by the suppressed wages of the American poor. As long as we can all agree that's the goal, or at least an accepted side effect, I'm willing to go along.
- prvc 7y ago
  It may be a good deal for the individual confronted with the binary choice, however, that does not change this phenomenon's essential reliance on the exploitation of the poverty of the developing world. The same dynamic is what enables sex tourism and exploitative natural resource extraction, and these are understood to be wrong for the aforementioned reason. Economic incentives cause the owning classes to overlook this in the case of the labor market, however. If there is a shortage of job applicants, raise the offered pay. This is the supposed way that 'free markets' are intended to function, but their putative proponents fight tooth and nail to prevent this from being necessary.
  - davidw 7y ago
    And...keeping people out is going to change that how?
jacobolus 7y ago
People raised as rural peasants have a lot more stamina for doing hard agricultural labor than people raised in suburbs without a manual-labor background. Making this observation isn’t “racist”. If immigration were blocked, just raising agricultural workers’ pay wouldn’t be enough to fill all of those jobs. But raising those jobs’ pay (e.g. by raising the federal minimum wage and enforcing it) would be a good idea anyway. Immigrant farm workers should still be paid fair wages.
- maxerickson 7y ago
  Stamina is the wrong word though. It's willingness or grit or something, not an innate physical characteristic that they picked up from rural poverty. Fun that your edit added "willing" while I was writing this.
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    A lot of it is stamina. Both physical and mental. Rural peasants are really tough in a way that is extremely foreign to suburbanites. My godfather (indigenous peasant in rural Mexico) spent some time in his youth carrying two 50-pound bottles of liquor on his back all day long up and down mountains over a rough trail. I get winded if I try to carry one of those bottles for a block of flat sidewalk. If someone asked me to strap two to a tumpline and hike up a mountain I would call them crazy. He spent other years working on coffee plantations under thieving brutal racist owners. And continued working on his own small plots of land every day up to maybe age 70, even as his body was thoroughly worn out. Now his grandchildren are white-collar professionals. This kind of hard manual labor is as demanding as any high-level sport. It takes years of (mental and physical) training to be able to handle it without falling apart.
    - maxerickson 7y ago
      Do it as much as you can for month and see how far you get. I'm 39 and for the last 6 months I've been doing a job that involves lots of manual labor, it's gotten easier, not harder. I guess I was in relatively decent condition at the start though, if you consider the US average.

mattmanser 7y ago

Immigrants contributing 'greatly' is not an established fact. Here's a meta analysis saying that at best the economic impact is minor, and worse still only the mega-rich benefit, while poor people actually suffer from it: https://www.nber.org/papers/w16736 https://www.nber.org/papers/w16736 If the birth rate is too 'low' then why not pay more benefits for having kids? Or raise the retirement age, as we obviously need to before our pensions all go bankrupt? Worse still, mass-migration is just shunting the problem down the line a generation or two, while most countries using it aren't investing enough in houses, hospitals, infrastructure, etc. to cater for the mass migration.

keepper 7y ago
“Immigrants contributing greatly is not an established fact” Funny thing to say about a country made up of immigrants... Let me guess, you’re not from nyc. You should visit Ellis island sometime. It IS the US immigration that has made it what it is now. I always love this part of a speech by Lincoln. “But when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.“
fzeroracer 7y ago
The meta analysis you link doesn't seem to quite agree with the way you're framing it. Quoting some of the relevant paragraphs: > The likelihood and magnitude of adverse labor market effects for natives from immigration are substantially weaker than often perceived. Within the large empirical literature looking at the effects of immigration on native employment and wages, most studies find only minor displacement effects even after very large immigrant flows. On the other hand, some more recent studies have found larger effects, and many studies note that the negative effects are concentrated on certain parts of the native population. The parts of the population most typically affected are the less-educated natives or the earlier immigrant cohorts -- that is, those who are the closest substitutes to the new immigrant flow currently experienced by Europe. > Immigration is often viewed as a large fiscal burden for European public finances or as a possible saviour if correctly harnessed. This has been palpable in the recent political atmospheres of France, Italy, and Germany, for instance. Most empirical studies, however, estimate the fiscal impacts of immigration to be very small. There certainly exist large differences across migrant groups in the costs and benefits they cause for a host country; the net impact depends heavily on the migrants age, education, and duration of stay. On average, immigrants appear to have a minor positive net fiscal effect for host countries. Of course, these benefits are not uniformly distributed across the native population and sectors of the economy. The gist being that overall the adverse effects immigration has on the market is much smaller than people perceive, that those most affected are either the prior generation of immigrants or those with less education and that the negative fiscal impacts are negligible at best, with immigrants generally contributing in a positive way.

billfruit 7y ago

I think another field is nursing, where large numbers of Indians are already employed in the US.

fishingisfun 7y ago

the issue is that they dont understand labor politics like the old school blue collar white and black americans do. They end up getting screwed like what happened with the medallion system all over America. I have read many comments about the medallion shake up where people simply said that it wouldnt have happened to white driver owners and that's the truth.