Illegal immigration could easily be solved by giving anyone who hires undocumented workers a million dollar fine. The American economy relies on a cheap, obedient and disposable class of workers.
It seems like we could solve the immigration problem very quickly if we started imposing harsh penalties on the people who employ illegal immigrants.
Undocumented immigrants, by definition, are going to be hard to track down. Businesses on the other hand have to have an office, be reachable, file taxes, etc. They're also probably breaking a host of other employment laws as well (easy to do when your employees can't go to the authorities). If the availability of jobs dried up, people would have no incentive to come here illegally.
Of course, that would involve arresting rich white people instead of poor brown people, so it will never happen.
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
If we cared about human rights, we should flip the situation on its head and impose heavy (in the 6 or 7 figure range) fines for hiring undocumented workers. If any of the workers are mistreated they should be able to turn in their employer.
That will give the workers an upper hand and would prevent them from being taken advantage of. Now the employer can live in fear of being exposed.
Exactly. Yet if you make it illegal to hire a non-citizen and you have millions of laborers you create a black market of cheap labor for unsafe business practices.
It's better to legalize and regulate something than to make it illegal. Make the minimum wage to hire a non-citizen the same $15/hour for a citizen and poof all the illegals now compete with the citizens at fair market rate.
There are two stories here. H1B immigration and illegal immigration.
Aren't illegal immigrants doing jobs that natural born citizens don't want to do? Farming, low pay contract work, etc.?
Businesses can't hire illegal immigrants on the books. They can't be waiters, retail workers, or other types of labor that the lower class depends on. So how does this impact America's poor and middle class? Absence of these workers should push prices higher.
H1B immigration is capped, and it has never led to a decrease in the salaries of skilled workers. Software engineers have never made so much.
More people working and living in the US will create more productivity and consumer demand, increasing the strength of our economy.
It's supply and demand 101. We've allowed 15-20 million illegal immigrants into our country who have no labor protection under federal law because they don't exist. End result is depressed wages up the chain.
Until somebody decides to enforce the laws requiring verification eligibility of employment, I consider all this talk of illegal immigrants to be misdirection. Convict the criminal employers who are paying illegal immigrants under the table. That would force wages up. Punishing the folks who come into the United States to work hard is disgusting.
This. Also it's already illegal for a corporation to hire an illegal immigrant. If trump hired 10,000 FBI officers to start punishing the corporations who hire these workers instead of punishing the workers themselves then we could see some progress.
What about offering a reward to unregistered immigrants in exchange for ratting out their employers? Works for other types of illegal labor... maybe a slice of the fine and the option of fast-tracked citizenship.
Anyway, policing businesses will always be easier than policing individuals... smaller numbers, immobile, already registered with the state, and they have stronger incentives to obey the law.
They are essential to the economy because American employers can pay below-market wages for back-breaking labor. I'd prefer to make such practices illegal, rather than continually subjecting undocumented immigrants to awful working conditions with no healthcare or legal recourse in cases of abuse.
If a concerted effort was made to improve the lives of such workers, I think you'd be surprised how quickly Americans would be willing to do those jobs.
If those illegal workers weren't here the wages on those jobs would stabilize to a wage that an American could afford to work it and Americans would work it.
The rich love immigration. They make way more money off the backs of workers.
The best way to improve the lives of hard working, blue collar Americans, is to have them compete with desperate, starving illegals with no rights. Why would you hire someone with rights when you could hire someone, who if injured, you can just push off the back of a truck. If you don't enforce the law, then you force everyone to break that law in order to be able to compete with the scumbags who hire illegals.
How do you know that your proposal would make the economy more unfriendly to Hispanics? Each time a business hires a citizen or legal immigrant, document fraud imposes a probability that you actually hire an illegal immigrant. If you raise the cost of accidentally hiring an illegal immigrant, you raise the cost of trying to hire a legal worker who looks similar to a population that stereotypically contains illegal immigrants.
Would that have an impact on the behavior of a rational business? Let's do some math, admitting that this is kinda a Fermi problem.
So if you are running a limited-service restaurant that employs poor people, and you have an employee working a 40-hr workweek at 7.35/hr, their yearly pay is $15,288. On top of that, you have an additional 15.3% ($2,329.88) [1] to pay for the employer's portion of social security and Medicare tax, $420 for unemployment tax[2], and employer portion of federal income taxes[3] of 10% on the first $11.525 ($922.50) and $15 on the rest ($555.45). And payroll for that employee costs $19,455.83. For a limited service restaurant, payroll overall costs 25%-30%[4] of gross revenue. So (making the unjustified simplifying assumption that revenue comes from employees roughly proportional to their payroll costs.) for each such employee, the business makes $64,852.78-$77,823.34 in net revenue per employee. Or, $45,396.94-$58,367.50 in revenue per employee after payroll but before other cost (goods, equipment, utilities, rent, etc) which we will all assume are fixed. So, if a business is risk-neutral, all costs other than labor don't effect decision-making, and we don't account for the possibility of going out of business then your policy is a bad idea if the probability of accidentally hiring an illegal immigrant and getting caught is 4.54%-5.84%.
What is the probability of hiring an illegal immigrant if a business hires someone who, to them, looks Hispanic?
If there are 11 million[5] illegal immigrants in the US. Let's say 7.35 million[6] of them are Hispanic/Latino in appearance (I'm talking about racial discrimination here, so the diversity of Hispanic peoples gets reduced to one question: Does a business owner think they "look Hispanic"?). One source[7], whose neutrality I doubt, claims that 75% of illegal immigrants have forged documents like social security cards. It would make sense that they would want to obtain documents that allow them to work, so lets assume that's true. So than means 5.5 million Hispanic people with forged documents. There are 55 million[8] Hispanic people living in the U.S. That means that 10% of them are people with forged employment documents. Accounting for the fact that illegal immigrants are more likely to be in the low-income workforce than Hispanic citizens, it's probably higher.
What is the probability of getting caught? I'm on a phone and too tired to continue this calculation and I'm on my phone. But if it was 0.45-0.58, then it would be prohibitively expensive for a risk-neutral rational business whose only cost was labor to hire someone who looked Hispanic. That sounds to like economic conditions that are unfavorable to poor Hispanic people.
Of course, you could fix this by adding a Mens Rea component to your proposal.
[6] ibid: 5.9 million from Mexico; pulled out of my ass: 1.45 million from elsewhere in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. I'm fudging the fact that there are black people and white people from those regions. Better numbers welcomed.
[7] I doubt it's neutrality but it does make sense that illegal immigrants would want forged documents. How hard it is to counterfeit? I don't know. http://cis.org/IdentityTheft
What, there is a shortage of workers willing to work for low pay?
The Answer. Create competition in the labour sector by relaxing border controls and let in immigrants. Keep there status as illegal, so that you don’t need to pay all the costs that legally protected employees are entitled to
And if you don't have minimum wage/hiring/firing laws, that would help with the illegal immigrants problem, as there would be no incentive to hire an illegal immigrant (it's only the headache of in case you are caught).
What American shouldn't want to import more taxpayers? The income threshold over which a family is a net contributor to the government probably isn't much about $60K. So, importing just about anyone with a skill would lead to a lower tax burden for all. And, it would improve the lives of the lowest paid Americans by creating more demand for basic services (house cleaning, lawn mowing, etc.)
I understand the labor unions' reluctance to allow unskilled immigration, but they ought to press toward allowing more skilled people as it would increase the demand for their members' services. Interestingly, I think most unions are now in favor of legalizing illegal immigrants -- kicking out 10M people seems undoable, so they're best served by eliminating the illegal, un-unionizable underclass.
The problem now is automation, but that's because all of the jobs that couldn't be automated have already been shipped overseas. I argue that automation, globalization, and arguably illegal immigration are the three largest factors gutting the lower and middle classes in America. Also, you don't have to give better jobs to everyone, just a big chunk. There are ~10 million illegal immigrants in the US, which has a population of ~300 million. Right or wrong, shipping them out or giving some sort of work visa(to require at least minimum wage pay) would raise demand for lower class jobs to the point where lower and middle class wages may finally start rising again.
Edited to recognize the open debate on illegal immigration. I don't understand how illegal immigration could lead to a better job outlook for the lower class. If anyone has some info on that, I'd appreciate it.
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