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From the Economist - "Man & Machine"

Lafayette

Lafayette

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Link: Kicking out immigrants doesn’t raise wages


Excerpt:
MEXICAN immigrants were said to be holding down wages and taking jobs that could go to honest Americans. The poorest natives were supposed to be suffering most grievously. “We cannot afford to disregard it,” intoned the president. “We do not condone it.” The immigrants were soon sent home and not allowed to return.

All that happened in the early 1960s. The president was John F. Kennedy; the Mexicans were participating in the bracero programme, which allowed almost half a million people a year to take seasonal work on America’s farms. But the parallels with the present are plain. Donald Trump has also complained that immigrants are keeping Americans from good jobs and has promised to do something about it (another parallel: not since Kennedy has America seen such an astonishing presidential coiffure). So it is a good moment for a bracing new assessment of the bracero scheme and its demise.

Michael Clemens and Hannah Postel of the Centre for Global Development, and Ethan Lewis of Dartmouth College, have used archived records of American agricultural jobs and wages to test whether Kennedy was right. Did ending the bracero scheme in 1964 in fact lead to higher wages and more work for Americans in the fields?

The answer is a firm no. In states where farmers had relied heavily on foreign labour—a group that includes California and Texas—American natives found a few more farm jobs in the mid 1960s. But the rise was small and temporary; within a few years the long decline in agricultural jobs had resumed. And the trend was almost identical in states where there had been no braceros. Similarly, farm wages rose in states where there had been lots of migrant workers, states where there had been few migrant workers and states where there had been almost none (see chart.)

Ending the bracero scheme seems to have affected American workers not a bit.
Click to expand...

Now that we can put the "nonsense of walling-out Mexico" to one side, perhaps we should concentrate on the Real Problem? Which is that the fact that low-end manufacturing jobs started leaving the US when Chinese goods started entering in the early-1990s and which is still current today. To such a point that our Trade Deficit with China declined 5.5% in 2016, but it still totaled USD 347 billion, more than three-fifths of the overall trade deficit

Manufacturing in the US has been reducing historically itself as a major percentage of our GDP. (It is becoming nonetheless highly-specialized with automation.) Which means what?

That base-level, easily manufactured but labor-intensive goods, are being shipped off to the Far East. What's a country to do?

Something it is has never ever done before. Allow high-school graduates to enter into vocational training in order to obtain jobs in a good number of other job-sectors - and to do so free, gratis and for nothing. (Exactly what both Bernie and Hillary had promised!)

Or would we rather be either financing their UI or, worse, sending them off to prison for larceny?

Why must that reeducation easy-solution be Mission Impossible in the US ... ?
 
Because that does not jive with the belief that poor people are poor because of bad life choices. That being poor is a choice, and one need only choose to no longer be poor, and work really, and it will be so.
 
Lafayette said:
Link: Kicking out immigrants doesn’t raise wages


Excerpt:

Now that we can put the "nonsense of walling-out Mexico" to one side, perhaps we should concentrate on the Real Problem? Which is that the fact that low-end manufacturing jobs started leaving the US when Chinese goods started entering in the early-1990s and which is still current today. To such a point that our Trade Deficit with China declined 5.5% in 2016, but it still totaled USD 347 billion, more than three-fifths of the overall trade deficit

Manufacturing in the US has been reducing historically itself as a major percentage of our GDP. (It is becoming nonetheless highly-specialized with automation.) Which means what?

That base-level, easily manufactured but labor-intensive goods, are being shipped off to the Far East. What's a country to do?

Something it is has never ever done before. Allow high-school graduates to enter into vocational training in order to obtain jobs in a good number of other job-sectors - and to do so free, gratis and for nothing. (Exactly what both Bernie and Hillary had promised!)

Or would we rather be either financing their UI or, worse, sending them off to prison for larceny?

Why must that reeducation easy-solution be Mission Impossible in the US ... ?
Click to expand...
"Kicking Out Immigrants Doesn't Raise Wages"
They should have titled it...
"We're Gonna Burn Down A Strawman"

Nobody argues that backbreaking farm labor jobs are jobs Americans don't want to do. Those farm laborers are a small number of illegal immigrants. Factory jobs, landscaping jobs, home construction jobs, even working at Wal*Mart or as a dishwasher in a restaurant. Those are all jobs that unemployed Americans wish they could get but can't because they're being taken by illegal immigrants.
 
KevinKohler said:
Because that does not jive with the belief that poor people are poor because of bad life choices. That being poor is a choice, and one need only choose to no longer be poor, and work really, and it will be so.
Click to expand...

Bollocks - one does not choose one's parents, and social-status defines economic-status in most instances.

Enhance willfully economic status of the individual, and poverty is avoided ...
 
Last edited:
reinoe said:
"Kicking Out Immigrants Doesn't Raise Wages"
They should have titled it...
"We're Gonna Burn Down A Strawman"

Nobody argues that backbreaking farm labor jobs are jobs Americans don't want to do. Those farm laborers are a small number of illegal immigrants. Factory jobs, landscaping jobs, home construction jobs, even working at Wal*Mart or as a dishwasher in a restaurant. Those are all jobs that unemployed Americans wish they could get but can't because they're being taken by illegal immigrants.
Click to expand...

Got proof for Walmart hiring illegals?
 
Last edited:
Lafayette said:
Now that we can put the "nonsense of walling-out Mexico" to one side, ?
Click to expand...

how can you put 30 million illegals aside when they are taking 30 million jobs from Americans?????

Nationwide, unauthorized immigrants are clustered in a few occupations, notably farming, fishing and forestry (26 percent of the workforce), building and grounds (17 percent), and construction and mining (14 percent). They comprise 24 percent of all groundskeepers, 23 percent of domestic workers and 20 percent of those in clothing manufacture.

In addition, they have carved out niches in certain relatively well-paid construction trades. They hold 34 percent of all jobs in drywall installation, 27 percent in roofing and 24 percent in painting.https://www.washingtonpost.com/loca...e745911a4ff_story.html?utm_term=.0ae196670864
 
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