4 ms·

America needs immigrants to solve its labor shortage

5 points by DocFeind 4y ago

NickC25 4y ago
No, it doesn't. I love immigrants, I love a good old fashioned rags-to-riches story as well. I've been an immigrant myself (albeit in another country as I am a US national). You know what America needs to solve the labor shortage? Better wages, that's what. The minimum wage has not kept pace with inflation in over 50 years. If you want someone to work, you need to pay them in accordance with the value they bring to the business, full stop. I don't want some billionaire with 10+ houses and a private plane using their money to commission puff pieces in the media complaining that nobody wants to work when said billionaire is offering slave wages and keeping the vast majority of the worker's fiscal output. Worse yet said billionaire cheats on taxes and whines when things go south, yet is happy to take a bailout and take a huge cut of said bailout instead of giving it to the people that operate the business. if minimum wage kept pace with inflation since the 1960s the national minimum wage would be roughly $29 an hour. I'd work for that, but not the $7.25 bullshit that hyper-profitable publicly traded megacorps insist is all they can afford to pay their non managerial staff.
pannSun 4y ago
> There were a record 44.8 million immigrants living in the U.S. in 2018, making up 13.7% of the nation’s population. This represents a more than fourfold increase since 1960, when 9.7 million immigrants lived in the U.S., accounting for 5.4% of the total U.S. population. - https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s-immigrants/ https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s... Given that immigration to the US has been high for decades, and 1st generation immigrants as a % of the population are at the highest levels since 1910, if immigration was the solution, wouldn't the problem* be solved already? *Instead of calling it a "labor shortage", why not a "job surplus"?

5 points by DocFeind 4y ago

No, it doesn't. I love immigrants, I love a good old fashioned rags-to-riches story as well. I've been an immigrant myself (albeit in another country as I am a US national). You know what America needs to solve the labor shortage? Better wages, that's what. The minimum wage has not kept pace with inflation in over 50 years. If you want someone to work, you need to pay them in accordance with the value they bring to the business, full stop. I don't want some billionaire with 10+ houses and a private plane using their money to commission puff pieces in the media complaining that nobody wants to work when said billionaire is offering slave wages and keeping the vast majority of the worker's fiscal output. Worse yet said billionaire cheats on taxes and whines when things go south, yet is happy to take a bailout and take a huge cut of said bailout instead of giving it to the people that operate the business. if minimum wage kept pace with inflation since the 1960s the national minimum wage would be roughly $29 an hour. I'd work for that, but not the $7.25 bullshit that hyper-profitable publicly traded megacorps insist is all they can afford to pay their non managerial staff.

pannSun 4y ago

> There were a record 44.8 million immigrants living in the U.S. in 2018, making up 13.7% of the nation’s population. This represents a more than fourfold increase since 1960, when 9.7 million immigrants lived in the U.S., accounting for 5.4% of the total U.S. population. - https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s-immigrants/ https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s... Given that immigration to the US has been high for decades, and 1st generation immigrants as a % of the population are at the highest levels since 1910, if immigration was the solution, wouldn't the problem* be solved already? *Instead of calling it a "labor shortage", why not a "job surplus"?