Jobs Americans Won’t Do
Our immigration policy is out of sync with our economy.
AP’s Will Weissert: “Immigrants help power America’s economy. Will the election value or imperil them?“
He begins, as is the custom, with an anecdote that’s almost surely unrepresentative:
Few things say America like Janille and Tom Baker’s ranch, with its grazing cattle, scrub brush-dotted desert and snow-capped mountains.
If only they could get American citizens to work on it.
The ranch in remote eastern Nevada produces around 10,000 tons of hay annually, and combines cowboy culture with a dash of Manifest Destiny. Rabbits, gophers and the occasional badger always outnumber humans and the nighttime sky is dark enough to count the stars.
But the Bakers’ business couldn’t survive without an agricultural guest worker program that brings in Mexican immigrants for about nine months a year to help harvest crops in fields where temperatures frequently exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius).
“When people complain that foreign workers are taking their jobs, I roll my eyes,” said Janille Baker, who manages the ranch’s accounting. “In any industry, everybody’s trying to find help. So this anti-immigration stance doesn’t really make sense to me. If everyone needs workers, how are you planning to fill those jobs?” The ranch follows federal rules that require advertising available positions and making them available first to U.S. citizens. But in the last six years, only two Americans called to inquire about jobs. A third trekked out in person, but left after seeing what the work entailed.
Weissert doesn’t report, and the Bakers don’t report, what the job pays or what benefits it offers. But, much later in the piece, we get this:
Tom Baker co-owns the ranch with his brothers, and it began operating in 1954, nearly two decades before the area was electrified. He calls it “hard, hot work” that’s “kind of miserable.”
These kinds of farms, without immigrants, would become infeasible because you can’t get anyone to come do the work,” said Baker, 54. “The wage isn’t the issue. It’s whether people will come do the job.”
And, indeed, the ranch has subsisted on Mexican labor pretty much since its founding.
The ranch has 26 employees, including five current H-2A immigrant workers. Many of the oldest ranch hands arrived long enough ago to get U.S. legal status through 1980s programs. Some have children who were born in the U.S. and are citizens, even if one or both of their parents are not.
The guest workers declined to comment, not wanting to attract undue attention. Still, three generations of immigrant workers at the ranch largely hail from the towns of Apozol and Juchipila in north-central Mexico.
The original arrivals now have grown children. Some of them work at the ranch and have had their own children who are now in high school and work there themselves during the summers. One former employee’s wife had her baby in a ranch vehicle on the way to the hospital, about 80 miles away.
Essentially, then, the Bakers require people willing to do hot, dirty work in the elements, probably for a meager wage (one imagines the profit margin on hay is small). And, realistically, live on the ranch full-time, since it’s otherwise an 80-mile commute to civilization.
What percentage of the American economy consists of similarly-hard-to-fill jobs, I don’t know, but I’d imagine it’s pretty low.
Still, the larger point Weissert is trying to make is unassailable:
Immigration has become a source of fright and frustration for voters in this presidential election — with possible outcomes that could take the United States down two dramatically different paths. Nowhere are the stakes higher than in Nevada, where 19% of residents are foreign-born and around 9% of the total workforce doesn’t have U.S. legal status.
The influx of illegal border crossings has strained city and state resources across the nation, even in Democratic strongholds. And yet immigration has fueled job growth in ways that strengthen the economy and improve the federal government’s fiscal health.
So black and white in the candidates’ rhetoric, immigration is actually incredibly complex in reality — a fact that reveals itself every day in Nevada.
[…]
If Trump deported all 11 million immigrants without legal status in the U.S., as he has suggested, the collateral risk could extend to the entire economy. Nevada’s job losses alone might nearly equal what it suffered during the 2008 financial crisis. More than 10% of Nevada’s population lives in homes with at least one immigrant in the country illegally, according to estimates from the advocacy group Fwd.us.
“In our wonderful, 24-hour economy, we know that these hotels and casinos could not, should not, would not be able to open every day without immigrants,” said Peter Guzman, president and CEO of the Latin Chamber of Commerce in Nevada.
Acknowledging that Fwd.us has incentives to fudge the numbers, it’s doubtless true that the service economy, like the farm economy, consists of a lot of jobs with undesirable working conditions combined with low pay. If hotels paid the folks cleaning their bathrooms $100,000 a year plus benefits, they would be able to attract citizens and legal immigrants. But they’d have to increase prices to the point where most couldn’t afford to vacation in Vegas.
A group of researchers led by Warwick J. McKibbin, an economics professor at the Australian National University, found that removing workers in the U.S. illegally would sharply reduce labor supply in the mining, agriculture, services, and manufacturing sectors. Deporting even 7.5 million workers might slash Real Gross Domestic Product by 12%.
If Nevada lost all of its workers in the country illegally, Labor Department figures suggest the direct job losses would be roughly as large as those from the 2008 financial crisis, which stalled tourism, triggered a wave of housing market foreclosures and cost the state about 9.3% of its jobs during the subsequent Great Recession.
And rounding up people in the country illegally may not even count people like Zetino, Marquez, and Nieto, nor the guest workers at Baker Ranch, all of whom are authorized to be in the U.S.
Zetino, 62, gained temporary protected status since arriving after a major 2001 earthquake in El Salvador, but saw Trump try to remove it during his term.
“These people don’t have any conscience,” she said of mass deportation supporters. “They believe they can lift up the country, move the economy forward, but they don’t think of those at the bottom.”
As with many issues, neither Trump nor Harris really represent me very well. While I favor her instinct to treat these folks like the desperate human beings they are, I’m sympathetic to Trump and others who believe we have a right to control our borders and decide who we want to allow to enter the country and under what conditions.
Rather clearly, though, a lot of Americans want to have their cake and eat it, too. To the extent we want cheap labor willing to do “the jobs Americans won’t do,” our immigration policies should reflect that reality. It’s all well and good to say that you don’t oppose immigration, just illegal immigration, but we invite the latter if we make it next to impossible for people who we want here to immigrate legally.
If we really wanted to keep out illegal immigrant workers the solution is simple: arrest and charge people like the Bakers who hire them (unless you believe that everyone they hire is a legitimate guest worker). If we are not willing to do that then we should accept that people who work year after year in hot hard conditions are exactly the people we should be granting citizenship to.
We cannot accept everyone who wants to come here. There are simply too many. But those who we bring in with a wink and a nod and who work here for decades are de facto citizens, and good ones.
From its inception, the job of cowboy was filled by immigrants, freed slaves, people on the run from the law or a bad situation, for the same exact reasons you outline above.
It was never a job that anyone who had other choices would take. Ditto for mining, field agriculture, sweatshop labor like garments or nonunionized factory work.
@TheRyGuy: so young men have no agency? They’re not responsible for the belief systems they chose to stick to? Everything that goes wrong with them is someone else’s fault?
I suspect that their problems aren’t due to drugs and porn, but the wallowing in self-pity, which causes them to self soothe with drugs and porn. It’s always easier to blame others rather than take responsibility for screwing up your own life.
@Grumpy realist: A persistent victim mentality is the shining hallmark of conservative thought.
I have never met a conservative that wasn’t, at his core, a whiny bitch.
@TheRyGuy:
Very few people will find working in a field all day adventurous. They won’t be part of a cattle drive. They will be baling, bucking and unloading hay all day. None of that involves horses, cows, or adventure (unless the occasional snake baled up with the hay is your idea of adventure.
@TheRyGuy: [T]here are plenty of young, unmarried men in this country who might find working a season or two on a cattle ranch to be a fun adventure. A fable told by racist failures to continue being racist failures. Remember that the people working these jobs are often there for decades, not for a couple years. It’s not an “adventure”, it’s a job, it’s hard work.
“But it’s hard to be adventurous when your society is constantly screaming at you that you are evil while inundating you with drugs and porn.” – Ah yes, the poor beleaguered lazy white man, always kept down by those willing laborers. Isn’t it a personal decision to watch porn and do drugs instead of working? If so, doesn’t that mean the people to blame are the very drug- and porn-addled young men who are angry to begin with? WTH do immigrants have to do with this? Those lazy people will still be lazy whether there’s a Honduran to throw hay or not.
And if you truly believe nothing changes because the wealthiest don’t want it to change, why on god’s green earth would you hang your hat on Donald Trump – alleged billionaire who tries to cheat every system possible so he can retain his wealth and status, a guy who rewards his wealthy patrons and steps on the face of anyone who gets between him and a buck, including people he’s hired to work for him, a guy who’s fine with hiring undocumented immigrants to work at his properties?
He’s proposing tariffs, ffs, the kind that would put us back into the Gilded Age of the late-19th C – famously a time when poor people living in terrible environments with shitty working conditions and long work days and weeks were exploited by an extreme wealth class. It’s almost like you don’t understand history or economics.
“That willfully irresponsible bad-acting is literally how we got Trump.” Bullshit. Racism is how we got Trump. Trump literally told his party not to pass the bill to increase border security because it would have made his presidential case weaker, then parroted made-up stories about immigrants eating dogs and cats to rile up his base. We didn’t “get Trump” by having a “broken immigration process”, we “got Trump” by having the Right embrace overt racism, preferring to stoke fear about human beings who don’t deserve it than to address a complex situation.
@TheRyGuy:
Allowing that theoretically such persons exist, it is unlikely to the point of impossible that there are enough such persons to feed the labor need in question.
A week of might be an adventure. A month, let alone a year, isolated on a ranch for meager wages is no adventure.
In fact we know, from attempts in AL and GA to chase away migrant workers and to get local to pick fruit and vegetables that the result was not the local youth showing up. It resulted in crops rotting in the fields.
I have argued for years that this is a fundamentally economy problem driven by clear and powerful supply and demand issues.
I used to think that “conservative” who were pro-market could be persuaded of these forces at work and therefore see the way forward to a more logical and workable immigration policy. Instead, like in the past, xenophobia wins out.
@MarkedMan:
I will agree that we cannot accept “everyone.” We could, however, accept a whoooole lot more than we do. Moreover, if it was easier for migrant workers to cross, do seasonal work and then go home, a lot of them wouldn’t stay. This used to be the case but one result of increased border security is that if a migrant makes it to the US they are less willing to risk going back for fear of not being able to return.
Our entire system is well and truly a mess on a host of levels.
Is the OP really saying that Harris affirmatively believes that the USA has no right to control our borders? Well when you frame it that way I would be hesitant vote for Harris too. The problem is that it’s not the f*&king truth. The truth is that Republicans are the issue, they won’t sign on to any plane that doesn’t result in less brown people and further more they saw what happens when the dog catches the car (like abortion), they simply can’t let another issue go in the Democrats column. so they lambast and shut down yet another bi-partisan border bill so the issue won’t be addressed and run on a vision on the border that is science fiction and fantasy.
They keep running their mouth about a border that is open and low and behold, people show up believing it. Which fuels the border “crisis”. Then they make sure nothing gets done, rinse and repeat. It exhausting, but just the thing for racist tinged low information voters.
No only does Harris not support an open border (absolutely no one does), but there is a comprehensive plan on the table to deal with it.
@TheRyGuy:
Also: while it is certainly true that both parties have shares of the blame, the Republicans have been the party to constantly block reform efforts including when congressional Rs wouldn’t go along with Bush’s attempts at reform.
No reform is possible if one side insists on fantasies like “sealing” the border. Further, things like the wall are a waste of money from an ROI and efficacy standpoint.
Note, too, that fentanyl and other contraband are far more likely to come via ports, which have nothing to do with migrants and a wall won’t stop.
Likewise, a substantial percentage of the undocumented living the US are visa-overstayers. That is, they entered legally, but didn’t leave. A wall/sealed border doesn’t solve any of that.
One last item: the pathway to legal status is arduous and disincentivizes people from trying.
If we want to figure out who to let in and who to block, you need a process. We barely have one at the moment, and it is understaffed and underfunded.
I linked to Kevin Drum a week ago. This looks like a good place to repeat it. In Texas, no one really opposes illegal immigration. He quotes a Texas Monthly article pointing out that
Drum, unsurprisingly, includes a chart. A chart of border crossings vs. US job demand. What’s driving increased immigration is mostly the amazingly good economy under Biden.
Trump isn’t really going to deport millions of immigrants. If he tried, as in TX, the agribusiness and construction lobbies would be all over congress. Trump would do what Abbott and the boys are doing, a lot of performative nonsense but no real effort to halt immigration.
With the spike in construction following Helene and Milton, the Sarasota paper suggested DeUseless send a plane to Marth’s Vineyard again to see if he can get back the migrants he sent there.
@Steven L. Taylor: I know we have disagreed on this, but my estimation of how many people would come if we opened the border wide would be north of one billion. So we can talk about “more” or “a lot more” but whatever number we come up with will not come close to meeting the demand. And climate change is only going to exacerbate it.
@Steven L. Taylor: Just a note to add that what you’re describing is standard GOP modus operandi on most issues. If Harris wins, the GOPs will likely hold one or both houses of congress. Failing that, they’ll still have the filibuster. They will move heaven and earth to prevent Harris from actually doing anything. Then in 2028 they will run against the resulting inaction.
@Tony W:
I wish they would make up their minds. One day MAGA men are (allegedly) anti-snowflake, hypermasculine f–k your feelings alpha males, the next it’s waaaaa boo hoo a liberal hurt my wittle feewings now I’m forced to drink beer and goon to Pornhub waaaaa.
I’m no PR guy, but maybe Republicans would do better if they pick a brand and stick to it?
Either way, I’ve never heard anyone of any gender or ideology say, “I was gonna be a fruit picker till those darn illegals showed up.”
@Steven L. Taylor:
But you aren’t accounting for the fact that me and the boys would go to those fields and yell at the new crop pickers about their porn and pot use. We never considered it a good day unless we got at least a bakers dozen to quit. I see now the damage we were doing to the national economy, the psyche to an entire generation of men, and to the cause of immigration reform, but at the time it just seemed like good fun.
@TheRyGuy:
Where are these young men getting the money for their drugs and porn?
Maybe it’s just difficult to stop people and goods from entering a country if they’re desired without building a totalitarian buffer zone in all directions. America spend decades trying to stop the influx of drugs, and how did that work out? Note how many Silicon Valley edgelords are angry about the number of illegal and legal immigrants who do the end work for their delivery/ride-share apps.
I think the border comes up as a holy grail because there’s nothing else to talk about with immigration, legal or not. It’s became a value in and of itself, with a meaning that’s probably pure nostalgia and kitsch.
Regarding young men, nobody who invokes them seems to care about the rise of legitimate addict-level sports gambling. This is like Purdue Pharm rolling out their wonderdrug Oxycontin in the late 90s. It’s a disaster unfolding right before our eyes.
Repeating for its obviousness. And for as long as I’ve lived, the Republican Party has gotten by on being a bakery.
Of course, you can stop having to hear Spanish at the store through mass deportation without a negative effect on food or travel prices.
Of course, you can get foreign countries to generate revenue for the US through tariffs and those countries will just go along without retaliation that is inflationary.
Of course, if we ban abortion, people will just have more children and if they don’t want children, they’ll stop having sex.
Of course, we can repeal the ACA and replace it with something better without increasing premiums while preserving pre-existing conditions protections.
Of course, we can lower everybody’s taxes and we’ll only need to shrink government through reduction of waste & fraud, plus the elimination of the government services we won’t name because they’re popular. (And of course, the military budget and entitlements won’t be touched.)
Please, anyone, name a Republican policy position from the last 30 years where the GOP has been honest about the real world implications of it becoming law.
[And if you have to say how the Democrats are the same or how the Dems just give stuff away to the takers, show your work on size of the budget deficit by party in the Executive.]
@Modulo Myself: gambling is one of the few addictions which regularly destroys many more people than the addict. Usually it’s the families that get destroyed while the gambling addict goes on and on and on, since there’s nothing physical that stops him/her like what happens to druggies and alcoholics. And it’s too lucrative for business to take a stance against it.
So we have established that @TheRyGuy: is north of 80 years old and has never done manual labor.
– Landscaping
-Any kind of large-scale meat processing operations
-Farming in general, especially crops that require hand picking (strawberries are back breaking work), or crops that mature at the peak of summer when it is hottest
-Carpet removal/installation
-Painting, particularly exterior work
-Most cleaning jobs
I could go on, but I won’t. The number of jobs that are hot, dirty, physically demanding, with low pay are EXTENSIVE in this country.
@Steven L. Taylor:
If Republiqans were on the side of free markets, they’d have tossed the Felon out in the primaries in 2016.
They’re the party of bigotry and xenophobia. And now they want it loud and obvious.
@TheRyGuy: While your first paragraph is insane, the other three are not terrible.
I think there’s a big difference between the parties on their past behavior, but both have veered much further towards the “no immigration” side of late. The bipartisan border bill that Trump had the Republicans kill was a shit bill that was basically the “reasonable” Republican view — just a capitulation by the Democrats.
And the Democrats are not making any case for increased immigration. They would get crushed in the elections if they did, mind you, because there’s been a decades long campaign of hatred towards immigrants.
You can’t fix what ain’t broken. A desperate workforce that doesn’t have the legal ability to object to employers breaking labor laws is what a lot of employers want.
The rest is just theater. Enforcement just keeps this labor force scared and compliant. We don’t do any serious kind of enforcement against the employers, because no one wants them to be scared.
@MarkedMan:
And who argued for that in this discussion?
Although a billion seems like a lot, TBH–indeed, it feels hyperbolic. It seems unlikely in the extreme that 12%ish of the world’s population would come to the US even if we had 100% open borders.
At a minimum, there is a cost to migrating and, at some point, the jobs do go away. But that is a different discussion that trying to put in place a more reasonable process to deal with the rather obvious supply and demand issue in question (not to mention a more humane system).
Let’s assume for a moment that Trump would do what he says he would do. How many US citizens who cannot immediately prove they are citizens, but “look like illegal immigrants” are going to get caught up into this? And what are we going to do when the home countries refuse to take people.
Covid actually gave us some insight into this, as we closed down the borders almost completely and shut down most legal guest worker programs. Here in Maryland there was a crab processing plant (crabs are a big part of Maryland culture and important to the economy) that had operated for decades. It’s a seasonal business and they brought in workers from Mexico, mostly women, to shell the crabs and extract the meat. At the end of the season they would go back to Mexico. Some of them had worked there multiple decades. The guest worker program was put on hold for (I think) two years, during which time he tried to hire local. No luck. Very few applied, and of the even fewer he hired, most quit the first week. So he shut down the factory and opened a new one in Mexico, so he didn’t have to worry about the supply of workers. (Dirty little secret: there isn’t nearly enough blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay to meet the demand for crab meat so most of the crabs come from elsewhere. So he was already shipping in most of the crabs they processed.)
@Steven L. Taylor:
No one. That wasn’t my point. My point was that while what you said may well be true (“We could, however, accept a whoooole lot more than we do”), it won’t do anything to relive the demand. It will still be a small fraction of the people who want to come and who will still try to come in illegally.
The one thing that we know for sure brings the illegal (and legal!) migration rate down is economic downturns that dry up the job market. If we started prosecuting employers that hired illegal immigrants it would also dry up the job market, at least for people entering the country illegally.
As for those claiming asylum and end up here legally, at least for a time, it is worth noting that when the job market dries up suddenly there are less people desperate to make the journey to the US and escape their situation. I’m not claiming there are no legitimate refugees, there most certainly are and I’m glad we are open to them, but pretending that the vast majority aren’t really economic migrants is just ignoring reality. We could get a handle on that by a massive increase in courts hearing asylum cases.
Then maybe we could set realistic goals based on actual US economic need and actual humanitarianism.
I think James did a pretty damned good job of highlighting some thorny issues and tradeoffs.
But comments are a mess. First, we should acknowledge that our transfer payment regime allows people to avoid doing hard work, at the expense of their neighbors. I beg your pardon, I never promised you……
Second, the notion that this is simply an issue of illegal immigrants filling jobs “Americans won’t do” (read: agriculture) is simplistic and false. It is much broader than that. Including the fact that we chased away our mining and manufacturing base, due in large part to environmental hysteria.
And lastly. Just an observation. I often hear lefties crying about capital “paying its fair share etc” Imagine if immigrants could not undercut US workers wages. Capital would have to raise wages, until that tipping point where consumers would not pay for certain goods and services anymore. Markets would sort that out. They always do. Far better than letting Venezuela shipping the dregs into our country to suck on the national teet and creating havoc.
@Gustopher:
“Mass Deportation” is NEVER described in practical terms.
How do you sort out blended families of legal and illegal immigrants? Where will you put the people who have been rounded up while they are being processed? How do they transport them to other countries? What happens to them once they get there? Where will the replacement cheap labor come from? Who is going to do all this deportation work with existing immigration processes understaffed and underfunded?
Mass Deportation is another empty promise of an easy solution to a very difficult problem. Par for the course for Republicans – turned up to 11 through Trump’s next level ability to sell a grift. Then, there’s the added benefit for the fascists of cruelty to Them.
@Jack:
Congratulations, you have just figured out why American businesses are reluctant to be part of any real immigration solution. Rising wages is why a lot of these companies have designed jobs that are unappealing to American workers–they WANT the access to illegal workers to persist.
Illegal workers do not complain about safety lapses.
They don’t complain about poor working conditions.
They don’t dare complain about wages.
American business owners could significantly curtail illegal immigration just by ensuring that the workers they hire are here legally. THEY DON’T WANT TO.
See also: Sarah Huckabee Sanders signing legislation allowing children to work in factories.
@Jack:
Oh, good, you’re here.
Explain how High Schools are performing sex change operations.
@gVOR10:
Lol. 😀 😛
@Joe: The drugs I can’t speak to, but a friend of mine who’s been looking for 3 years for a therapist* to treat his porn addiction tells me that there’s lots of decent quality free porn on the web.
The people making big bux on Just Whatever-it’s-called are engaging in selling a premium product. Conspicuous consumption extends across many markets. Even porn and prostitution.
*Therapists who take insurance are apparently hard to find. Maybe we shoulda cultivated insurance-dependancy for therapist economic survival earlier.
@Modulo Myself: I’m always amused seeing a print or TV ad for a gaming site posting the (seemingly required) “if you or someone you know has a gambling problem…” inset for the ad. I always want the inset to end YOU SHOULDN’T BE WATCHING THIS AD, YOU F**KWIT!!
Alas, it never does.
@Gustopher:
What we do now with unhoused Americans–shuttle them from neighborhood to neighborhood with camping bans?
Proven policy with proven success. Only on a global scale.
@TheRyGuy:
Well, that’s one very interesting way of characterizing young men who support Trump.
@Scott F.:
How do you sort out blended families of legal and illegal immigrants? We don’t.
Where will you put the people who have been rounded up while they are being processed? In large temporary camps out in the desert.
How do they transport them to other countries? Same way they do now.
What happens to them once they get there? Not my problem. Don’t do the crime if you etc. etc. etc.
Where will the replacement cheap labor come from? From our new Arbeit Macht Frei camps for unhoused Murkans.
Who is going to do all this deportation work with existing immigration processes understaffed and underfunded? Well, we can’t keep going on this way or we’ll have hundreds of millions of dirty illegal economic refugees flooding our shores.
I know I promised I would no longer comment on your posts, but I just couldn’t resist this time. You ask important questions and the answers are stupid, but in my defense, they are actual statements made by real people I have had that exact conversation with. (Slightly embellished with contemporary enhancements in some cases.) My apologies if you feel like I’ve singled you out to criticize. It isn’t my intention.
I suspect that if we stopped migrant workers, the result would not be rising wages in many of those industries. Instead, some would be moved overseas, where the low wage workers remain. And those like tending and picking crops will be automated. With modern machine learning, I suspect the only reason we don’t already have machines plucking a ripe asparagus stalk from amidst the others, pulling a weed rather than a crop, or identifying pests and applying pesticides has more to do with inertia and a reluctance to incur more capital debt, than anything a human can do better.
@just nutha:
I don’t know what you’re apologizing to me for. I don’t take any part of your comment as criticism of me (except perhaps as an indictment of the clarity of my writing). I agree the answers you gave are the only answers. I agree they are stupid answers. I agree they are ugly answers. I also believe they are unrealistic answers. That’s kind of my point. These questions don’t get asked of GOP politicians and even when asked, they are never answered as honestly and realistically as you have here.
I don’t doubt that you’ve had real people make these actual statements to you. I’ve heard similar. I think where we’ve argued past each other is that you think I have some wish to convert these people. I don’t. The people who would answer this way are a lost cause and they can go to hell.
I just don’t believe there are enough of these people to hold power in this country without the willingfully blind loyal tribalists, the tax cut & deregulation whores, and the cowardly politicians who enable them pushing their magic bullet solutions and downplaying the fascism. I’m predictable, I think. Pretty much my every comment is either pointing out cowardice of those who know better or challenging the willful blindness.
I’m not wasting breath on the MAGAts, except to mock them.
@Jen:
Thank you for your argument that employees and consumers are not greedy. After all, they never shop on price, or switch jobs for more money. Are we still in kindergarten?
Look, you poor dear, the world is more complicated.
I have no use for Mitch McConnell and his corporate Republican immigration lobby. If you don’t understand that team Democrat is just the same you are an idiot.
Quit the Dem cult. Vote America. @Michael Reynolds:
@Michael Reynolds:
It looks like you are pointless, as always. Any other crazed, wild eyed and vanishingly rare issues you want to jack off to?
@Jack: You always resort to insults. It’s unnecessary, and it makes it far less likely that anyone will take you seriously.
You have no use for corporate Republicans? Who, exactly, do you think funds Republican politics? Democrats have at least worked hard to get to an immigration bill that Trump torpedoed because it didn’t suit his campaign interests. THAT says more than anything else.
“The world is more complicated”? Yes, “dear,” I know that–I grew up abroad. There’s far more beyond our shores, and much of it has an impact on our economy.
@Jen, bear in mind that “they are all equally bad” is the last refuge of the lazy and incompetent, and it all makes a lot more sense.
Looking at economic fundamentals, the unemployment rate in the US is 4.1% with 3.4% for Arizona and 4.1 for Texas. These are fairly low rates historically. Maybe there are jobs Americans won’t do because they already have jobs; jobs they find more congenial. Farm workers earn about $16 per hour which translates to less than $37,500 a year if you assume 52 weeks of work. I think that farm worker have some fallow times.
@Jack:
Banning abortion is not “just the same” as opposing abortion bans.
Bothsidesism is lazy + provably false. All fruit naturally shares certain characteristics. But, no, apples are actually not oranges.
I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t tell the difference between legitimate news sources and crap. Become a Trump supporter? Shoot myself?
I have a sister that is very proud that she considers all sources, all the time. When I point out that she knows some of these sources have lied to her (either omission or commission) it doesn’t phase her. She is still “gathering information and doing research” and feels confident that if she just takes enough in the truth will emerge.
@MarkedMan:
Uh, mind if I review your worksheet for that answer. I mean, it looks like it’s at least an order of magnitude, but if you’d only show us your work.
@Flat Earth Luddite: I don’t know how I would go about showing my work on what seems obvious to me. I lived two years in a no-electricity, no-running water village in West Africa (Peace Corps) and I can tell you for certain that if I had pulled a passenger lorry up to my vocational school and told my students that if they got on I would take them to the US, but they couldn’t even stop to say goodbye to their families, all but one would have boarded without hesitation. Or the Indian guy who worked for me, born of a well to do family, Masters degree in Engineering from a US university, already in the US for 11 years with a wife and two kids, and there are so many like him that there were 18 years worth of Indians just like him in line for a green card. If an Indian with those prospects was willing to subject himself to the uncertainty and petty humiliations involved in that, what would a billion plus impoverished Indians be willing to go through?
One last thing. I’m of Irish descent. When my parents came over in 1950, 40% of young Irish emigrated, with 80% of college graduates catching the boat. And Ireland in 1950, as poor and backward as it might have been, was at least two orders of magnitude better off than a billion plus Indians, a half a billion Chinese, a couple of billion Africans, and, well, you get the idea.
I can’t understand how anyone could think that if millions are willing to f*cking walk from Venezuela to Texas, through heat and rain and criminal gangs, that billions wouldn’t be willing to do it if they knew they could get in on arrival.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Between 1900 and 1920, about 15 million immigrants arrived in the US. That’s about 1% of the world population of the time. Transportation was much harder then, and the US borders were not entirely open. About 1 American in 7 was foreign-born.
I think it’s plausible to think that, if the US were really open to any immigrant, up to 3% of the world population might head this way. Call it 250 million. That would result in about half of Americans being foreign-born, which seems qualitatively different.
Currently, we are back to about 1 in 7 Americans being foreign-born, after many years of lower percentages. (Note that there is significant variance in the estimates of this, from a low of about 13% to a high of about 20%.)
I offer these as neutral facts, with no associated claims of what is better or worse.
@DrDaveT: In Slouching Towards Utopia Brad DeLong notes that
One in fourteen = 7%.
@Scott F.:
Prisoners.
States make decent money renting out prisoners.
Remember, we banned slavery except as a punishment for a crime in the 13th Amendment.
@Jack:
Coward.
@MarkedMan:
I wasn’t necessarily arguing against your point, I just found the number statement hyperbolic and jarring. If you had included your follow up clarification, I might not have found the initial comment so jarring.
While I agree that significant immigration could result, given our broken immigration system and a lack of available transportation, I don’t see how we would have a billion new residents of the United States. YMMV, and it certainly wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong.
@Jack:
You have to ignore everything your rapist cult leader says and refuse to even acknowledge that he’s said it, and when challenged you run away, run away. So it’s lies followed by cowardice.
You’re from my generation, you know what it is to ‘be a man’ by those standards. And you must know you’re none of the things we were brought up to be.
So, what happened to you? Have you been hanging around High Schools? Did they only do the first part where they cut off your balls without making you a woman?
Trump winning won’t suddenly make you whole. Yellow doesn’t wash out.
@Flat Earth Luddite: Just to be clear, I don’t think we could have a billion new residents either. My point to Steven was that however (realistically) much we increase the number of slots, there will be one or two orders of magnitude more excluded. In other words, there will still be illegal immigration.
@Jack:
But Democrats didn’t call for the “termination” of the US Constitution. Nor did Democrats send a terrorist mob to the Capitol on Jan 6. Elderly, exhausted rapist and failure Dementia McDonald did that. He’s too much of whiny, Putin-puppet crybaby to accept America rejected his failed presidency by 8 million votes.
Of course, MAGA slaves know this. They’re just unpatriotic patholgical liars — just like their Epstein-bestie cult leader Trump.