9 ms·

Collapse of international mobility a key factor behind wages growth

80 points by kryptonomist 5y ago

hhaha88 5y ago
Of course it has to be an end of scary immigration. Best distract from the story of workers not showing up for peanuts anymore.
- ardit33 5y ago
  you missing the point yo. Workers are being paid peanuts because illegal immigration suppresses their wage. Why pay someone $18/hr plus benefits/taxes, where you can pay some one who is an illegal immigrant for $12/hr, and no benefits and willing to do the job? Simply supply and demand. Illegal immigration suppresses the wages of the low end type of jobs (manual labour and such), which in turn hurts people that are low income, and mostly minorities. I am always baffled by some of the 'progressives' that chant BLM slogans, workers rights, and Defund the ICE at the same time. Unfettered illegal immigration hurts black and lower income / working people the most. "Champage leftism/progressivism" is the worst. It makes things worse for everyone involved, except themselves. It is political grift.
  - salt-thrower 5y ago
    ICE was created in the Bush years and has been demonstrably brutal and racist. You don’t need ICE to handle immigration. Somehow America made it until the 2000’s without it, and much like other three letter agencies created post-9/11, their effectiveness is dubious at best. One real way to solve illegal immigration would be to make it easier to legally immigrate. Making them citizens means they have equal labor rights and can’t be treated like serfs, so then can command higher wages. Also, outsourcing has done far more damage to the working class than immigration. Billionaires ginning up the “they’re taking your jobs” sentiment while offshoring as much good paying blue collar work as possible. Neoliberalism in a nutshell.
    - coryrc 5y ago
      It was a re-org of INS. Bush the Lessor did not create it. Today you even see immigration down and wages up and still you deny reality.
  - filoeleven 5y ago
    > Illegal immigration suppresses the wages of the low end type of jobs “Failure to enforce existing labor laws against employers who hire illegally” is a critical step between “illegal immigration” and “suppressed wages.” Abolishing ICE does not equate to stopping immigration enforcement: ICE has only existed for 18 years; enforcement did not start in 2003. The waters are also muddied by conservatives’ intentional conflation of “refugee applicants” with “illegal immigrants.”
  - hhaha88 5y ago
    Pretty sure intentional political scheming is what’s hurting everyone. What do I know having been in rooms with people of the sort to be invited to Davos talking about keeping power out of the hands of the masses, just as James Madison, author of the Constitution, meant when he wrote the Senate ought to protect the opulent minority from the poor majority. Blue collar Protestant work ethic is the worst. Instigating anxious doing in rubes is tribal warlord 101; yes yes you stay busy while I sit here. My value store isn’t dollars, it’s a network of people collectively building in all contexts, not just the ones that are preferred by politics (indeed the “god father” of market economics, Adam Smith, only mentions one market; a free labor “market” that can move between gigs as needed; not sitting still for one employer). That just gives rich nobodies a pass on real effort, loads me up on real work by gate keeping undesirables rather than training them. It effectively creates constraints on agency at scale, and quotas for the poor; exactly the sort of economy the US is not. I bet the rich didn’t have a hard time finding TP. You’re letting someone grift alright, just not who you think.
    - dang 5y ago
      We've banned this account for using HN for ideological battle and ignoring our request to stop. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - klyrs 5y ago
    [flagged]
kryptonomist 5y ago
"The collapse of international mobility and therefore immmigration is a key factor behind wages growth acceleration in advanced economies."
- throwvirtever 5y ago
  That is the full text of the tweet. I don't see any support for that assertion anywhere though.
  - h2odragon 5y ago
    I think its implicitly an argument from authority, the twitter poster is a "somebody"
    - dqv 5y ago
      Earlier on Twitter, there was an account called SoDamnTrue that would just tweet pop-wisdom. It's a SoDamnTrue tweet for economists.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - btilly 5y ago
    The claim fits with supply-demand curves. If you're missing 2 million people who would happily take low wage jobs, and there are as many of those jobs to do, the price paid for that work has to go up. That said, I suspect that the great resignation has a whole lot of impact as well. Again, reduced supply causing an increased price. (The ones who walk away from bad jobs into good ones not being as impactful as the ones who took early retirement post-COVID, accelerating a worrisome demographic trend of having lots of old people and few working age people.)
    - fallingfrog 5y ago
      Just because a claim appears plausible on casual observation doesn’t make it true. You have to do better than that. Another plausible explanation is that the boomers are aging out of the workforce, and the following generations are smaller.
_Microft 5y ago
On Nitter for those without a Twitter account: https://nitter.net/C_Barraud/status/1459440257783549954 https://nitter.net/C_Barraud/status/1459440257783549954
- sneak 5y ago
  Teach a man to fish: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-redirect/pmcmeagblkinmogikoikkdjiligflglb https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-redirect/p...
  - novok 5y ago
    The default redirects are way slower, at least behind a mulvad VPN, did you reconfigure yours to have faster ones? Also most youtube videos are not as high quality as the original youtube site, typically 1080p+ seems to be missing.
    - sneak 5y ago
      I did not. I will probably run a local invidious instance soon.
christkv 5y ago
I don’t see this as a problem at all. If anything it show how immigration is exploited to keep salaries artificially low and hurt the worker and lower middle class.
- nend 5y ago
  Can you expand on that? Who is doing the exploiting and how are they doing it?
  - twofornone 5y ago
    The managerial/investor/owner class that ultimately profits from low wages?
    - anonuser123456 5y ago
      I'm fairly certain the migrants profit considerably from the bargain.
      - LongTimeAnon 5y ago
        $2 an hour must be like winning the lottery every 15 minutes. Go away, Brookings Institute shill.
  - christkv 5y ago
    If a job is worth 10 eur a hour but there is a lack of workers they have to offer more to attract workers. If I bring in immigrants who are willing or forced by circumstances to accept 10 eur an hour I keep the hourly rate down. Once you remove this factor the businesses have to pay the actual market rate for the work.
    - Swizec 5y ago
      Businesses are always paying the actual market rate for the work. It’s just that immigration changes the supply side of that market.
thatfrenchguy 5y ago
Correlation is not causation?
- rndgermandude 5y ago
  Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes correlations do in fact point to the causation, it's just that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. In this case, it would be very hard to determine, tho. You cannot just do a controlled experiment on nation-scale economies. What you can do is look at what changed and what changed in likely reaction to it (and you still might be wrong). However, in the pandemic years, a lot more than just immigration numbers changed dramatically, which makes assessing this theory even harder, if not entirely impossible.
seneca 5y ago
Stated another way, importing illegal immigrants has suppressed wages for Americans for decades. Nothing about that should be surprising. Illegal immigrant labor is a key part if the American economy. These people are intentionally kept in a state of legal limbo. They're tolerated, but always could be prosecuted and have their lives destroyed. This keeps them exploitable and able to be treated in ways we would never tolerate for American workers. The entire game is that because they are breaking the law, employers can ignore labor law when it comes to employing them. It's like any black market. The fact that everyone is breaking the law means all bets are off. An imported serf class, intentionally kept in an exploitable legal state, is inherently going to reduce the leverage of labor that would otherwise occupy those jobs.
- Jeff_Brown 5y ago
  Good God that's a coherent argument where I'm used to reading gibberish.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > importing illegal immigrants has suppressed wages for Americans for decades. Er, no, to the extent immigration is an issue with the recent wage rise legal immigrants have done that. Net illegal immigration dropped below zero without significant upward wage pressure well before the pandemic. EDIT: Just to be clear, its not actually legal immigration dropping, either, that led to the tight labor market; its the acceleration of permanent (e.g., retirement) and temporary departures from the labor force during (and in part induced by) the pandemic
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    During the peak of US anti-immigrant frenzy, net illegal immigration was negative.
- dash2 5y ago
  You may be right, but... got evidence? Here's Hanson et al. (2002): In this paper, we examine the impact of enforcement of the U.S.-Mexico border on wages in U.S. and Mexican border regions. ... For a range of empirical specifications and definitions of regional labor markets, we find little impact of border enforcement on wages in U.S. border cities and a moderate negative impact of border enforcement on wages in Mexican border cities. These findings are consistent with [ed: i.e. either of] two hypotheses: border enforcement has a minimal impact on illegal immigration, and illegal immigration from Mexico has a minimal impact on wages in U.S. border areas.
timdaub 5y ago
Classic tweet and a reason I don't like Twitter. It's completely unclear what is being said here specifically even though I understand a tiny bit of economics. It'd be better if the author would have either not said anything or took the time to formulate their thoughts into a piece of text worthy and representative of the complexity of the concept.
- sva_ 5y ago
  There is a line of arguments that are sometimes made which claim that immigration leads to the stagnation of wages (abundant supply of workers -> lower wages). I believe the author is trying to express this.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    > I believe the author is trying to express this. Really sums up the problem here. If the author had substantive points to make then they should have been made somewhere other than Twitter. Economics isn't impossibly hard but there is too much to cover for a tweet to be a useful contribution to any debate. Really all it can do is act as a sort-of straw poll for if people agree with an idea, but even then a Tweet doesn't fill that role well. Tweets are by nature a bit vague and poorly sourced. Match that up with basic selection bias and there is nothing useful to be gained in economics by Tweet.
- late2part 5y ago
  Who cares what the author intends to say here? This is an interesting fact and observation that stands on its own. It leads to curiosity, interest, and exploration. Noone owes you a fully ELI5 document.
  - kjaftaedi 5y ago
    This isn't a fact. It's a hypothesis. It does not "stand on it's own"
Proven 5y ago
Bullshit. Did wages in developed countries drop because too many qualified workers stayed home? I don't think so. Any significant tech employer can employ an arbitrary number of workers right where the workers are, immediately and without wait or relocation. Why would they or host countries limit their options in any way? Those employers couldn't care less about where employees work from.
aga98mtl 5y ago
The country as a whole is not better off if the wage growth causes inflation and economic slowdown. It amounts to a wealth transfer to those who work currently from those who retired and now live on fixed income. It's a zero sum game. Funnily I find that it's the older people who are the most against immigration. Let them enjoy the high prices for anything that involves local labor.
- theonlybutlet 5y ago
  That's exactly what I was taught in Uni, and was my go to reasoning. But come to think of it, higher wages and lower rents would benefit younger folks. Seems it's not a one way street and perhaps you and me were indoctrinated.
YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
Is it just me or is that graph labelled confusingly? The graph is titled "Contribution of international migration to population growth", the x-axis is years and the y-axis is "millions per year". Well, millions per year- what? Migration, or growth? I think, from the accompanying snippet of text from JPMorgan that it's meant to be population growth ("the working-age population has been falling for almost two years") but in that case why is there only one line on the graph? Shouldn't we be looking at the line for growth side-to-side with the line for migration? How does the graph show the relation between migration and growth? I also don't understand how "population growth" in the title of the graph becomes "wages growth acceleration" in the text of the tweet. Also also: is this graph about "international" migration, as implied by "international mobility" in the tweet, or specific to the US, as implied by the subtitle of the graph, "Source: Census Bureau J.P. Morgan"?
black_13 5y ago
Ive seen what H1b does to those in it from India, they never stand up for themselves. The IT guys from Wipro would tolerate the worse kind of verbal abuse from superiors and this established an acceptable culture of abuse the Indian management felt it was acceptable to scream at me. Worse the client Capital One when they tired of a project let everyone go and they sent everyone back to the subcontinent. H1b is a shitty system and any one who uses or promotes it is evil.

80 points by kryptonomist 5y ago

Of course it has to be an end of scary immigration. Best distract from the story of workers not showing up for peanuts anymore.

ardit33 5y ago
you missing the point yo. Workers are being paid peanuts because illegal immigration suppresses their wage. Why pay someone $18/hr plus benefits/taxes, where you can pay some one who is an illegal immigrant for $12/hr, and no benefits and willing to do the job? Simply supply and demand. Illegal immigration suppresses the wages of the low end type of jobs (manual labour and such), which in turn hurts people that are low income, and mostly minorities. I am always baffled by some of the 'progressives' that chant BLM slogans, workers rights, and Defund the ICE at the same time. Unfettered illegal immigration hurts black and lower income / working people the most. "Champage leftism/progressivism" is the worst. It makes things worse for everyone involved, except themselves. It is political grift.
- salt-thrower 5y ago
  ICE was created in the Bush years and has been demonstrably brutal and racist. You don’t need ICE to handle immigration. Somehow America made it until the 2000’s without it, and much like other three letter agencies created post-9/11, their effectiveness is dubious at best. One real way to solve illegal immigration would be to make it easier to legally immigrate. Making them citizens means they have equal labor rights and can’t be treated like serfs, so then can command higher wages. Also, outsourcing has done far more damage to the working class than immigration. Billionaires ginning up the “they’re taking your jobs” sentiment while offshoring as much good paying blue collar work as possible. Neoliberalism in a nutshell.
  - coryrc 5y ago
    It was a re-org of INS. Bush the Lessor did not create it. Today you even see immigration down and wages up and still you deny reality.
- filoeleven 5y ago
  > Illegal immigration suppresses the wages of the low end type of jobs “Failure to enforce existing labor laws against employers who hire illegally” is a critical step between “illegal immigration” and “suppressed wages.” Abolishing ICE does not equate to stopping immigration enforcement: ICE has only existed for 18 years; enforcement did not start in 2003. The waters are also muddied by conservatives’ intentional conflation of “refugee applicants” with “illegal immigrants.”
- hhaha88 5y ago
  Pretty sure intentional political scheming is what’s hurting everyone. What do I know having been in rooms with people of the sort to be invited to Davos talking about keeping power out of the hands of the masses, just as James Madison, author of the Constitution, meant when he wrote the Senate ought to protect the opulent minority from the poor majority. Blue collar Protestant work ethic is the worst. Instigating anxious doing in rubes is tribal warlord 101; yes yes you stay busy while I sit here. My value store isn’t dollars, it’s a network of people collectively building in all contexts, not just the ones that are preferred by politics (indeed the “god father” of market economics, Adam Smith, only mentions one market; a free labor “market” that can move between gigs as needed; not sitting still for one employer). That just gives rich nobodies a pass on real effort, loads me up on real work by gate keeping undesirables rather than training them. It effectively creates constraints on agency at scale, and quotas for the poor; exactly the sort of economy the US is not. I bet the rich didn’t have a hard time finding TP. You’re letting someone grift alright, just not who you think.
  - dang 5y ago
    We've banned this account for using HN for ideological battle and ignoring our request to stop. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- klyrs 5y ago
  [flagged]

kryptonomist 5y ago

"The collapse of international mobility and therefore immmigration is a key factor behind wages growth acceleration in advanced economies."

throwvirtever 5y ago
That is the full text of the tweet. I don't see any support for that assertion anywhere though.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  I think its implicitly an argument from authority, the twitter poster is a "somebody"
  - dqv 5y ago
    Earlier on Twitter, there was an account called SoDamnTrue that would just tweet pop-wisdom. It's a SoDamnTrue tweet for economists.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- btilly 5y ago
  The claim fits with supply-demand curves. If you're missing 2 million people who would happily take low wage jobs, and there are as many of those jobs to do, the price paid for that work has to go up. That said, I suspect that the great resignation has a whole lot of impact as well. Again, reduced supply causing an increased price. (The ones who walk away from bad jobs into good ones not being as impactful as the ones who took early retirement post-COVID, accelerating a worrisome demographic trend of having lots of old people and few working age people.)
  - fallingfrog 5y ago
    Just because a claim appears plausible on casual observation doesn’t make it true. You have to do better than that. Another plausible explanation is that the boomers are aging out of the workforce, and the following generations are smaller.

_Microft 5y ago

On Nitter for those without a Twitter account: https://nitter.net/C_Barraud/status/1459440257783549954 https://nitter.net/C_Barraud/status/1459440257783549954

sneak 5y ago
Teach a man to fish: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-redirect/pmcmeagblkinmogikoikkdjiligflglb https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-redirect/p...
- novok 5y ago
  The default redirects are way slower, at least behind a mulvad VPN, did you reconfigure yours to have faster ones? Also most youtube videos are not as high quality as the original youtube site, typically 1080p+ seems to be missing.
  - sneak 5y ago
    I did not. I will probably run a local invidious instance soon.

christkv 5y ago

I don’t see this as a problem at all. If anything it show how immigration is exploited to keep salaries artificially low and hurt the worker and lower middle class.

nend 5y ago
Can you expand on that? Who is doing the exploiting and how are they doing it?
- twofornone 5y ago
  The managerial/investor/owner class that ultimately profits from low wages?
  - anonuser123456 5y ago
    I'm fairly certain the migrants profit considerably from the bargain.
    - LongTimeAnon 5y ago
      $2 an hour must be like winning the lottery every 15 minutes. Go away, Brookings Institute shill.
- christkv 5y ago
  If a job is worth 10 eur a hour but there is a lack of workers they have to offer more to attract workers. If I bring in immigrants who are willing or forced by circumstances to accept 10 eur an hour I keep the hourly rate down. Once you remove this factor the businesses have to pay the actual market rate for the work.
  - Swizec 5y ago
    Businesses are always paying the actual market rate for the work. It’s just that immigration changes the supply side of that market.

thatfrenchguy 5y ago

Correlation is not causation?

rndgermandude 5y ago
Maybe. Maybe not. Sometimes correlations do in fact point to the causation, it's just that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. In this case, it would be very hard to determine, tho. You cannot just do a controlled experiment on nation-scale economies. What you can do is look at what changed and what changed in likely reaction to it (and you still might be wrong). However, in the pandemic years, a lot more than just immigration numbers changed dramatically, which makes assessing this theory even harder, if not entirely impossible.

seneca 5y ago

Stated another way, importing illegal immigrants has suppressed wages for Americans for decades. Nothing about that should be surprising. Illegal immigrant labor is a key part if the American economy. These people are intentionally kept in a state of legal limbo. They're tolerated, but always could be prosecuted and have their lives destroyed. This keeps them exploitable and able to be treated in ways we would never tolerate for American workers. The entire game is that because they are breaking the law, employers can ignore labor law when it comes to employing them. It's like any black market. The fact that everyone is breaking the law means all bets are off. An imported serf class, intentionally kept in an exploitable legal state, is inherently going to reduce the leverage of labor that would otherwise occupy those jobs.

Jeff_Brown 5y ago
Good God that's a coherent argument where I'm used to reading gibberish.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> importing illegal immigrants has suppressed wages for Americans for decades. Er, no, to the extent immigration is an issue with the recent wage rise legal immigrants have done that. Net illegal immigration dropped below zero without significant upward wage pressure well before the pandemic. EDIT: Just to be clear, its not actually legal immigration dropping, either, that led to the tight labor market; its the acceleration of permanent (e.g., retirement) and temporary departures from the labor force during (and in part induced by) the pandemic
- pessimizer 5y ago
  During the peak of US anti-immigrant frenzy, net illegal immigration was negative.
dash2 5y ago
You may be right, but... got evidence? Here's Hanson et al. (2002): In this paper, we examine the impact of enforcement of the U.S.-Mexico border on wages in U.S. and Mexican border regions. ... For a range of empirical specifications and definitions of regional labor markets, we find little impact of border enforcement on wages in U.S. border cities and a moderate negative impact of border enforcement on wages in Mexican border cities. These findings are consistent with [ed: i.e. either of] two hypotheses: border enforcement has a minimal impact on illegal immigration, and illegal immigration from Mexico has a minimal impact on wages in U.S. border areas.

timdaub 5y ago

Classic tweet and a reason I don't like Twitter. It's completely unclear what is being said here specifically even though I understand a tiny bit of economics. It'd be better if the author would have either not said anything or took the time to formulate their thoughts into a piece of text worthy and representative of the complexity of the concept.

sva_ 5y ago
There is a line of arguments that are sometimes made which claim that immigration leads to the stagnation of wages (abundant supply of workers -> lower wages). I believe the author is trying to express this.
- roenxi 5y ago
  > I believe the author is trying to express this. Really sums up the problem here. If the author had substantive points to make then they should have been made somewhere other than Twitter. Economics isn't impossibly hard but there is too much to cover for a tweet to be a useful contribution to any debate. Really all it can do is act as a sort-of straw poll for if people agree with an idea, but even then a Tweet doesn't fill that role well. Tweets are by nature a bit vague and poorly sourced. Match that up with basic selection bias and there is nothing useful to be gained in economics by Tweet.
late2part 5y ago
Who cares what the author intends to say here? This is an interesting fact and observation that stands on its own. It leads to curiosity, interest, and exploration. Noone owes you a fully ELI5 document.
- kjaftaedi 5y ago
  This isn't a fact. It's a hypothesis. It does not "stand on it's own"

Proven 5y ago

Bullshit. Did wages in developed countries drop because too many qualified workers stayed home? I don't think so. Any significant tech employer can employ an arbitrary number of workers right where the workers are, immediately and without wait or relocation. Why would they or host countries limit their options in any way? Those employers couldn't care less about where employees work from.

aga98mtl 5y ago

The country as a whole is not better off if the wage growth causes inflation and economic slowdown. It amounts to a wealth transfer to those who work currently from those who retired and now live on fixed income. It's a zero sum game. Funnily I find that it's the older people who are the most against immigration. Let them enjoy the high prices for anything that involves local labor.

theonlybutlet 5y ago
That's exactly what I was taught in Uni, and was my go to reasoning. But come to think of it, higher wages and lower rents would benefit younger folks. Seems it's not a one way street and perhaps you and me were indoctrinated.

YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago

Is it just me or is that graph labelled confusingly? The graph is titled "Contribution of international migration to population growth", the x-axis is years and the y-axis is "millions per year". Well, millions per year- what? Migration, or growth? I think, from the accompanying snippet of text from JPMorgan that it's meant to be population growth ("the working-age population has been falling for almost two years") but in that case why is there only one line on the graph? Shouldn't we be looking at the line for growth side-to-side with the line for migration? How does the graph show the relation between migration and growth? I also don't understand how "population growth" in the title of the graph becomes "wages growth acceleration" in the text of the tweet. Also also: is this graph about "international" migration, as implied by "international mobility" in the tweet, or specific to the US, as implied by the subtitle of the graph, "Source: Census Bureau J.P. Morgan"?

black_13 5y ago

Ive seen what H1b does to those in it from India, they never stand up for themselves. The IT guys from Wipro would tolerate the worse kind of verbal abuse from superiors and this established an acceptable culture of abuse the Indian management felt it was acceptable to scream at me. Worse the client Capital One when they tired of a project let everyone go and they sent everyone back to the subcontinent. H1b is a shitty system and any one who uses or promotes it is evil.