You hear the rhetoric. "Illegals are taking our Jobs!" I'm in no way a Professor of economics, but I can comment from my own experience. I made my fortune Commercial Fishing and I now own some fast-food franchises to get me through into retirement. Although, I do not 'knowingly' hire Illegals, I can say for certain that these two Industries rely heavily on immigrant labor. Safe to say other industries, especially in manufacturing and farming, have the same problems for similar reasons. In the Alaskan fishing Industry, its extremely hard to find Americans who aren't meth heads that can handle the long hours without complaining or quitting. They do exist, but when a boat rolls into port and half his American crew leaves due to exhaustion, you pretty much grab whoever is standing at the docks and they usually are Illegals with fake paperwork. Especially for the B and C seasons. Within the fast food Industry and any similar low wage shop its the same. I'm fortunate enough to live in a upper class neighborhood and can attest to the difficulty of myself and my competitors in my area at finding any one to take the job. Absolutely every restaurant, super market and retail stores here have a help wanted signs begging for workers. The reason for us is simple, the kids here wont work minimum wage jobs when they can make more in allowances from their parents or have their education fully paid for. So all of us have no choice but to hire immigrants to stay in business. Bottom line, at least from my perspective, is that without the cheap labor from down south keeping myself and others here in business, we go under along with the high paying Administrative jobs and ownership positions. I personally would be economically crippled and I wouldn't be spending the money I do now on home improvements and toys keeping the economic wheels of my local economy turning. Is it the same all over the country? Maybe, maybe not as I haven't been everywhere to compare my experiences. However, If a Business can not find the labor to fill the low paying positions and is in competition with cheap foreign goods like what is happening where I live, then two things have to happen, cut production or close shop which could only lead to a local and possibly broader cascading economic downturn. This is probably why for the entire history of our Country neither side of the political aisle has done a thing to stem the flow of cheap laborers. The only other alternative I can see to this model would be to increase wages of these crappy jobs so more affluent Americans would be willing to work them and would have more money to spend. You would have to coincide this with strict trade restrictions to prevent cheap foreign competition. This would take either stronger Government regulations or Strengthening Private Unions because very few Business owners will raise wages on their own if they aren't forced to. But I don't see this happening anytime soon in this Political climate. So Illegals it is....
The pool of able bodied American workers has not changed but the percentage of dependence has increased with the ease in which one can be on the dole. End entitlements and all sorts of people will come out of the woodwork looking for a job. People would fight over the most menial jobs and illegals would disappear. It's that simple. Would it happen overnight? No and it would be painful but it is necessary if we ever want to be the nation we once were. You want cheap labor? There are millions of American kids who have college degrees but no prospects and would be happy to work for $12 or $13 dollars an hour and you would have your pick of the best and the brightest. Right now America's biggest problem is our leftward tilt toward a welfare state and that is a huge Ponzi scheme that will eventually go broke and then what? It's all about survival, cut off the flow off free everything and people will beg to work instead of working at begging,
If e-verify became required and embraced the number of 'illegals' would be significantly reduced. Wages would go up. That said deporting a bunch of workers would cause severe damage to the economy, like you describe.
Illegal aliens can go (*)(*)(*)(*) themselves along with anyone supporting them or hiring them. This is treason.
You are correct, but I wouldn't, if I were you, expect to win over the xenophobes who are prideful in their ignorance. They gots demselves a phd in life afterall.
OOOO!!!! Xenophobe!!!! Cool word but it doesn't mean anything here in the US, we all came from somewhere else but we did it legally. Using dismissive liberalspeak doesn't change anything, excessive welfare and illegals are real problems law abiding tax paying AMERICANS are not and we have the right to dislike anyone we want and especially those who are picking our pockets.
I see your dilemma, how about a compromise? An employer goes to Immigration and says "I need 10 workers. I can't find an American who will do the job for the money I'm offering but I have found 10 illegals who will work for low pay" Immigration then gives a temporary amnesty for the 10 illegals. These 10 then go through a quick background check for warrants etc. and if everything is OK they are given a temporary work permit. Now while they are working the Department of Labor calls in in one of the local long term unemployed welfare rats and says "Congratulations, we have found you a job, report here 8am Monday morning" If the welfare rat says "I'm not doing that" or "I don't want a job I get my Government check every 2 weeks" The reply would be "By refusing to accept a job your welfare stops right now" If the rat doesn't turn up at 8am, his welfare is stopped and he goes hungry. If he does turn up and can do the job of one of the illegals, who you can now positively identify, the illegal has his temporary work permit revoked and a deportation order issued.
There is almost no one with a college degree that is happy to work for 12 or 13 dollars/hr. I agree in some respects with your welfare state claim in general but am wanting more clarification. The amount of money that actually makes it to the poor is not that much. A significant portion goes in to administration which is a form of welfare. The Military industrial complex is also a form of welfare which currently eats up 1 trillion dollars per year. Other gov't civil service welfare programs eat up much as well. Our system is currently a form of "Oligopoly-Bureaucracy Fusion monster". One head of this monster is military but there are others ... healthcare is another big one. You can cut of every penny to the poor and this will not change anything. This is a relatively small amount of money and the monster will eat it up quickly. Both Red and Blue serve the monster. This monster is creating a system of indentured servitude. It is also creating a quazi totalitarian police state and crushing individual rights and freedoms. If you are truly worried about survival you need to learn about the monster that is attacking that survival. That monster is not the poor. They are nothing in the grande scheme of things. This is just the monster diverting your attention away from its presence... divide and conquer. Keep you occupied with chasing crumbs while it eats your lunch.
Alaskan_sol, maybe your fishing industry is benefited from illegal imigrants, but my experience shows another side. I have a brother and a friend who began training in the IT field back in the late 1990s (Clinton era). My brother found a good paying job at the time, but my friend was just graduating IT school when Clinton expanded the H1B program to allow a higher number of immigrants into the U.S. because employers claimed they "couldn't find qualified workers to fill" their jobs. My friend was unable to find IT employment after graduating school. Furthermore, the average pay scale for IT people fell significantly because of the influx of new IT people from overseas. IT field has been paying much lower rates since then. This same story can be applied to any field of employment. The primary reason for limiting immigration was to protect American workers and their rates of pay. When wholesale immigration, or even ignoring the laws currently in place then pay remains stagnant, like it has for the last 15 years or so. Sure, some people make more money because they are smart enough to make themselves more marketable to employers. But for most workers, pay rate increases have NOT been keeping up with inflation. Immigration limits are supposed to protect American workers. Steve
Yes you do. Yes. Wealthy Libs, using illegal labor for their business, and to mow their lawns and clean their homes. Meanwhile in the Republican suburbs you look down your noses at, we hire Americans and the kids that work at the grocery store are our neighbors and play on our kids ball teams. They will not work at the wage you are offering. Same thing with agriculture. Folks won't pick fruit for minimum wage, but they damn sure would pick it for 25-35 dollars an hour. You are not increasing your wages to market level, because the flood of low skilled illegals is allowing you to circumvent the market, through illegal activity while you claim plausible deniability. And the result is idled Americans, sitting on various government relief, that you support because you are just so frickin "compassionate." Bingo.
I think you will find, the cost of benefits paid to illegal's, far out weights the benefits, not to mention the cost of American's who now are losing wage averages, unheard of. There is no reason to go into the legal aspect, both in entering or while in the Country, but it's greater than any conceived value cost of American's.
If all the illegals are deported, who is going to mow our lawns and do other landscaping jobs??? Most American's won't do that type of work since many cannot make ends meet with the pay scale that type of work pays.
In my opinion you've answered your own question. Lack of cheap labor leads to increasing wages which leads to increasing prices. What business owner will shutter their business simply because they cannot find cheap labor? There'd be some business closures but as the weaker businesses close the stronger businesses would fill the void and raise prices and hire more expensive labor. Look as a consumer you aren't going to stop eating or buying gas. If gas costs double then you pay double. If the price of a cheeseburger goes up then you pay more for a cheeseburger. So business will survive because if everyone stops selling gasoline then I'll open a gas station and I'll build the cost of labor, product, and overhead into the gasoline I sell. My personal theory is that the cheap illegal labor is what is causing incomes to stagnate.
The menial jobs are performed by many illegal immigrants and they do help to boost the economy, but they do get lousy pay for their work. I would like to see someone with a college degree climb up a 40 ft. palm tree and trim the branches.
Well, I'd do it, but you'd have to compensate for better than lousy to do it- and then I'd probably only have it as a part time job. Get some sun, work out of doors- whats not to like?
Not for the wages you pay an illegal. But, there is certainly a price/point at which they will mow your lawn and trim your hedges. And you will also be bidding against the social network. The better the benefits they get for doing nothing, the more you will have to bid to get them to come do your landscaping. And that is the way it should be, you digging into your pocket to pay for the things you claim to support.
Mow lawns? Teenagers? White people maybe? Guess what. The economy won't stop if lawns don't get mowed. People will just pay more and suddenly others might think that's it's not a bad way to make money without any higher education?
you said the only alternative to this model is to raise the wages to get americans to do the jobs... you realize you hiring illegals, is why wages are depressed and kept down in america? so you ARE the problem you claim is causing this... social security was not to help the elderly, it was to get them out of the work force to create an artificial labor shortage so it would get young people hired and put pressure on wages increasing them once the supply of available young people dropped... this is what not hiring illegals could do, if employers like you, didn't hire them... it would create an artificial labor shortage again, putting pressure on wages increasing them for americans... once we make all the illegals, legal, and they compete for the legal jobs, we will dramatically grow unemployment numbers since like you said, people will hire the hard working illegals who now can get paid the same rates all over america... and ironically this will create a vacuum effect, drawing new illegals into america to essentially replace the illegals who worked harder for less, but since they became legal they moved on up the ladder to other opportunities... so we will compound and amplify the VERY problem YOU are creating already by hiring the illegals... how INSANELY ironic... and you don't seem to grasp it, I guess thats because like you said, you're not a professor of economics... P.S. you actually don't need to be a professor, this is something first year students learn... well used to, now they are all on prerequisite waiting lists and they don't get this class until their second year of paying too much for loaned money... heh thats a whole separate issue to get into... P.S.S. you said companies won't raise wages unless compelled to... go to north dakota, walmart is STARTING low skill employees at $18 an hour because there is such a labor shortage thanks to the oil boom... retired people are coming out of retirement on top of it for the high wages... imagine what happens when you get your dream of a high minimum wage, and that happens nationwide, combined with the illegals moving on up the ladder legally, and the vacuum of new illegals coming in... I wouldn't want to be a young person with no work experience, they will suffer...
clearly you've never hired an arborist... many of them have degrees and climb trees on a daily basis... but even more don't and just learned it on the job...
