Thank you both for replying with so many salient data points that underline how fucked things have gotten.
Immigration is an interesting variable. I'm an immigrant myself, but I'm also coming to question the wisdom of shipping in a cheeky hundred thousand people every year. It does seem like a bid to keep a scam economy running more than anything else. The supposed dearth of skilled employees is most likely another politically manufactured "shortage."
IMO, immigration has very little to do with the problem, and is more of a political whip.
We as a country are simply eroding our own need for (or at least focus on) unskilled labor. In fact, we're eroding "almost" all of our labor, unskilled, skilled, artistic, etc... Engineers, software devs/coders, and machinists are some of the only ones that have really escaped the purge, and even they're being eaten by foreign labor and technology. By its nature, entrepreneurs who want to make money try to find areas of the market where there is a cost/supply, productivity, or other form of inefficiency, and then fix it.
And they're doing a good job.
Whole ranges of American labor have been automated, crowd-sourced, or offshored right out of existence in the US (and world). See this chart by the MIT Tech Review that talks about it. [1] In particular, note the effect of changes in the service industries, such as Uber, which already make up a ridiculously large portion of our economy. Purely speculation, but I'm generally on the side of folks that think "first world problems" is very shortly going to represent having tons of productivity and no actual jobs.
Nailed it. Couldn’t take the article seriously in its omission of these facts. I believe I read that immigration policies are having a negative effect of removing around 1.5m workers from the force.
Not just in low income jobs, either. I’ve been unable to hire quite a few folks in high tech because of our VISA process issues. Such a fucking mess.
This labor shortage feels like it could have been easily avoided with some common sense govt regulation, but America has gone totally off the deep end there.
It's exacerbated by the rich heavily relying on cheap labour and fresh credit to keep wages low and the GDP growing.
Lots of companies rely on the Temporary Foreign Worker program to fill menial minimum-wage jobs, often paying those TFWs below minimum-wage and abusing them. Similarly, the student visa program is a backdoor for lots of companies (particularly delivery & logistics). I also used to work at a government-sponsored employment centre where I met hundreds of skilled new-immigrants who gave up everything to emigrate, only to arrive in Canada and realize they'd been deceived about their prospects (e.g. the barriers to recertification).
I am not against immigration — both my spouse and I are children of immigrants — but it's important to differentiate between reasonable immigration policies and excessive ones designed to prop up a failing system by constantly injecting new bodies. Canada's immigration system is the latter; it predominantly benefits the rich and nobody else.
It's because skilled immigrants are being brought over specifically to make large companies richer. That's it. There is no other reason. In 95% of cases, there are plenty of people here that can do the job.
Even more confusing is why we then have 100k immigrants that are randomly selected with unknown skills from all over the world to come here and take up things like driving taxis. All the while we have labor shortages for basic things like nannies and baby sitters.
And most of it is greedy corporations and lack of worker protections. There's always enough money to increase CEO salaries.
I can concede that unskilled immigration is putting downward pressure on the salaries of low/no skill workers, but the US social inequality is the elephant in the room.
I find it surprising that no one in the comments has mentioned that at least in the US, immigration, documented and undocumented is down. Especially documented. For all the negative comments from some circles about immigration, it doesn’t surprise me that it would contribute, at least in part, to a labor shortage.
This is usually a dogwhistle for more immigration, I've seen it happen first hand in my country. Once wages started to reach a liveable standard most employers wouldnt hire anymore, especially in the blue collar sectors. Then they imported cheap temporary labour and exploited those people for pennies and then sent them back broken to their country.
Most immigrants (legal and illegal) are not Indian software engineers working at Google. They are low skill/poorly educated and got in on refuge status or because they have a family member already in the country. They work as taxi drivers, construction workers, cashiers, etc. It's not a huge leap of imagination that a constantly increasing low skill labor supply is to the detriment of current workers in these fields (many of whom might be immigrants themselves). 29% of immigrants lack a high school degree or equivalent GED and are disproportionally represented in the service industry, construction, maintenance, and other blue collar positions.
So yes, it is likely that immigration rates have a negative effect on the wages of native workers in low barrier of entry positions. You'd have to suspend disbelief to accept the narrative that there is no impact.
Skilled labor immigration reform is perhaps the single most important factor for this country to maintain its relevance in the international race for talent acquisition. It's demoralizing (yet expected, I suppose) that it continues to proceed at a snail-like pace.
Perhaps the most telling quote from the article:
"But proponents of more skills-based immigration say the salary differential is overstated. They say immigrants tend to create jobs because they are twice as likely as U.S.-born people to start their own companies and can help improve access to foreign export markets."
The most fascinating unreported metric is that all new jobs since 2018 have gone to immigrants and none to Americans. Shocking this isnt talked about more but news outlets have wars to cover I guess.
All post-pandemic job growth, has gone to foreign-born workers.
Theres links US government collected data in this source that explains it well
==The pie hasn’t grown for four decades [1], and the middle class has been hollowed out [2]. The existing system must be fixed before more burden is placed on it.==
Your first chart doesn't show a stagnant pie, looking at GDP numbers disproves that theory. The pie has absolutely grown, corporations have just chosen to keep more of it.
The problem is that you are connecting these things directly to immigration and there isn't much evidence to back that up. You are taking a real problem (stagnating wages and fewer corporate profits going to workers) and shoehorning in an ideological belief to explain it. Your sources provide no evidence that immigration is to blame for either of these phenomena. They simple show that the phenomena exists.
==We don't throw our hands up when we can't find workers to clean up nuclear waste accidents. We build robots for the job.==
Wasn't your entire point that we are just hiring immigrants to do this work instead of building robots (your Wisconsin dairy example)?
Being an immigrant is not virtuous in and of itself. How many of those 40% 'immigrant families' immigrated here poor and climbed the economic ladder, and how many took stolen wealth from a feudal system in the old country and built a business?
Instead of investing in our domestic population with job training and scholarships, corporations are importing labor from overseas. Those people getting imported have degrees (sometimes of dubious quality) paid for by socialist states, often work for 'staffing agencies' to circumvent benefits and PTO of the real company, have very little job mobility, are most often paid below-market rates.
It's basic economics. More labor means cheaper labor.
Why are Blacks and Hispanics underrepresented in Software development [1]? If you compare the overall employment figures to the overall demographics of the country, they're almost identical, but way, way off for software development. It's because the most vulnerable people in the US don't have access to jobs and education, and corporations have no incentive to train entry level workers when they can just import them.
> so the U.S. is really shooting itself in the foot (again).
In what manner? The US doesn't need every genius walking on planet earth to reside in the US.
Nobody wants to work anymore [at terms that are only beneficial to me]. The worst jobs pay the lowest salary. Employment rate is low enough many don't have to put up with it. So we now have immigration, legal and otherwise. Jobs have to be done, so either raise pay, hire desperate immigrants or go out of business.
One of the reasons immigration is such a tough issue is that illegal immigrants are by and large good, hard-working people who are willing to work at less than minimum wage and without benefits.
So you got 5 million of these guys, all working in some kind of quasi-invisible status. Meanwhile the guy that runs the local business runs into all sorts of complexity when trying to hire a "regular" employee.
As the disparity continues to grow between the minimum amount that businesses must provide and the ability of undocumented workers to provide cheap labor, unemployment will probably trend up. (Just pulling that conclusion out of my ass, but it tracks with what I am seeing as I travel and talk to people running businesses)
I should note, this is a vicious cycle. There is a feedback loop
The very real issue is the use of H1-B visas to drive down the cost of labor across the board. Its not a coincidence that real wages in the US have declined since 1970 while the percentage of population immigrants represent have tripled from 4.7 to over 14%
Immigration is an interesting variable. I'm an immigrant myself, but I'm also coming to question the wisdom of shipping in a cheeky hundred thousand people every year. It does seem like a bid to keep a scam economy running more than anything else. The supposed dearth of skilled employees is most likely another politically manufactured "shortage."
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