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Adam Davidson at The New York Times has a story debunking the myth of the job-stealing immigrant:
When I was growing up in the 1980s, I watched my grandfather — my dad’s stepdad — struggle with his own prejudice. He was a blue-collar World War II veteran who loved his family above all things and was constantly afraid for them. He carried a gun and, like many men of his generation, saw threats in people he didn’t understand: African-Americans, independent women, gays. By the time he died, 10 years ago, he had softened. He stopped using racist and homophobic slurs; he even hugged my gay cousin. But there was one view he wasn’t going to change. He had no time for Hispanics, he told us, and he wasn’t backing down. After all, this wasn’t a matter of bigotry. It was plain economics. These immigrants were stealing jobs from “Americans.”
I’ve been thinking about my grandfather lately, because there are signs that 2015 could bring about the beginning of a truce — or at least a reconfiguration — in the politics of immigration. Several of the potential Republican presidential candidates, most notably Jeb Bush, have expressed pro-immigration views. Even self-identified Tea Party Republicans respond three to two in favor of a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Every other group — Republicans in general, independents and especially Democrats — is largely pro-immigrant. According to Pew, roughly as many people (18 percent of Americans) believed in 2010 that President Obama was a Muslim as believe today that undocumented immigrants should be expelled from the United States. Of course, that 18 percent can make a lot of noise. But for everyone else, immigration seems to be going the way of same-sex marriage, marijuana and the mohawk — it’s something that a handful of people freak out about but that the rest of us have long since come to accept.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @03:05AM
The problem with illegal immigrants isn't that they "steal" jobs, it's that they depress wages for the jobs they take. There is a perverse mythology in the US about the nobility of doing grinding, menial labor for almost no money, and there is an attitude that Americans should be ashamed for not wanting jobs that they think are beneath them... But you know, this is a first-world country. We can afford to pay agricultural workers a living wage, and we should. It's hard enough to get it done with fast food workers - we don't need people sneaking, and working for a wage that can support a family in Mexico. We need to pay people a wage that will support them here.
An unwillingness to pay Americans at a rate commensurate with their skill is driving the same thing with legal, technological workers. The myth of the "STEM" worker shortage is driving H1B usage to levels that are absolutely having a negative peffect on American workers. I live near Microsoft. They're pushing H1Bs so hard, the demographics of the region have changed drastically in just ten years. This isn't my anecdotal opinion... NPR in the area recently had a , "Gee, that's interesting story" about the demographic change, and the fact that Microsoft is almost entirely responsible. I know people who were cut loose and replaced with cheaper, imported labor. I don't dislike Indians. What I dislike is corporate hijacking of the political system, and corporate hostility towards American workers and fair pay.
CEO pay growth is the nail in the coffin.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @03:28AM
> The problem with illegal immigrants isn't that they "steal" jobs, it's that they depress wages for the jobs they take.
That's true whether they are legal or illegal. But the the magnitude of the effect is still relatively small, on the order of just a 5% decrease for high-school dropouts. [thedailybeast.com] The other side of it is that immigrants are consumers too. Their purchasing supports a lot of service jobs.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by kaszz on Saturday March 28 2015, @03:41AM
Less salary, less consumption. And part of the money leaves the country so it won't benefit the country where they are earned.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @04:02AM
> Less salary, less consumption.
More people, more consumption. And if you read the linked the article you'll see that it can enable people higher up the salary ladder to work when they previously couldn't. A mother and housewife with a college degree can hire a nanny and/or housekeeper so that they can go from no work to part-time work.
> And part of the money leaves the country so it won't benefit the country where they are earned.
Drop in the bucket compared to the trade deficit.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @04:26AM
Doesn't look like a troll to me. How the fuck are people defining "troll" now?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @04:31AM
Its just one rogue moderator. Shit happens.
(I am the author of the down-modded post in question)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @07:21AM
Rogue moderator? One? How about a gaggle of us! And the Rouge Moderator!~
Sarah Palin has taken jobs away from real Alaskans, ones with much larger mammilaries!
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday March 28 2015, @05:46AM
And part of the money leaves the country so it won't benefit the country where they are earned.
The size of that problem is enormous. 21 Billion to Mexico alone [toprightnews.com], and Migrants working in the United States sent a staggering $120 billion back to their families last year [dailymail.co.uk]
One in 10 mexican households relies on money sent home
All of it leaves the country Tax Free, very often with zero payroll withholding taxes, by people who don't pay income taxes.
The US official foreign aid budget for 2016 is scheduled to be 22.3 billion. [usaid.gov] This isn't aid in the form of fighter jets and tanks to dictators, but rather USAID delivered directly to the poorest of the poor, in addition to food aid.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @06:04AM
> The size of that problem is enormous
Compared to a trade deficit of over half a trillion.
>All of it leaves the country Tax Free, very often with zero payroll withholding taxes, by people who don't pay income taxes.
66% of illegal immigrants pay payroll taxes [reason.org] with no hope of ever collecting on it.
> The US official foreign aid budget
Bad comparison. Foreign aid is nearly all handouts to US companies. They don't send cash overseas, they buy goods and services from american companies for delivery to the poor. Its a good job if you can get it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Immerman on Saturday March 28 2015, @02:48PM
Just to put that in proper perspective, half a trillion = 500 billion, so that $120 billion money export is a wealth-flow imbalance roughly 1/4 the size of the trade deficit.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @03:08PM
Just to put that in perspective, the Fed printed that much every couple months for a few years.
And its still a drop in the bucket for a 16 Trillion dollar economy.
$120 billion is about 6 months interest on the national debt.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday March 28 2015, @06:50PM
Bad comparison. Foreign aid is nearly all handouts to US companies.
Nope. You are thinking of military aid. Follow the links I posted to USAID.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 28 2015, @09:11PM
> Nope. You are thinking of military aid. Follow the links I posted to USAID.
Nope. Try this for example. [usatoday.com]
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday March 28 2015, @08:09AM
Yeah, same thing with the Gringos! My cousin turned around an entire Aircraft carrier fleet just so he could get his re-enlistment bonus as during combat duty? If it wasn't for both money sent home and the VA benefits for my otherwise totally disabled and useless relatives, my family would be just as bad off as those Mexicans you mention. But, you know, we are not Mexicans, we are Americans. Notice the only difference is the first four or five letters.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by wantkitteh on Saturday March 28 2015, @10:47AM
Where someone who earned their money chooses to spend it is their own God-Given Star-Spangled All American Right(TM).
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday March 28 2015, @02:15PM
Exactly, and that's why every country should exercise their right to control their borders with care to not destabilize their society's long term sustainability.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Monday March 30 2015, @02:41AM
Less salary, less consumption.
It also leads to lower prices for food, without which many of us would struggle even more to pay for it. Food is not a luxury or a non-necessary service, it is needed by everyone and in our economy that cheap labor can probably never be replaced until we have robots doing it all.
Many, many years ago, barely if even a teenager, I worked a summer at a family farm for 75 cents an hour. A few of the older kids got as much as $1.25 per hour. None of us were paid until after harvest, when we received what at the time we thought were fat wads of cash. The farmers certainly did not exhibit any signs of getting wealthy from our cheap labor. Those jobs for kids are gone now, not lost to cheap immigrant labor, but lost to land use costs, the farm I worked on has sadly long been a housing development.
(Score: 1) by wisnoskij on Saturday March 28 2015, @02:00PM
Seriously. Look at a field like construction in the US. Now travel 20 miles north into Canada and look at the wages. A completely different story.
Or course they are not taking a native's job. Any field they get into they dominate completely. There are just some jobs, agriculture/taxi/construction/many factories, that have such bad conditions and such bad pay that no one else will work in them. But many of them only exist in the first place because there is an illegal subclass of people to exploit.
(Score: 1) by wisnoskij on Saturday March 28 2015, @02:08PM
I am not sure I agree with the agriculture worker example. I am a farmer. Even farm owners do not make minimum wage. It is the only area where I disagree that the pay and conditions are so bad because of a class of easily exploited people. I think that is just a truism; Agricultural work is hard, dangerous, and is not profitable enough to make any money on. Agricultural, in all societies above subsistence living, requires either robotized machinery or immigrants from subsistence level societies to be brought in to do the work. We simply have too much food and far too many food subsidies, for the end product to be worth any reasonable amount.
(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday March 29 2015, @04:04AM
And yet Canadian farmers fly Central Americans in, pay them $12-$15 an hour, house them, and fly them home while making money with less subsidies then American farmers get.