Here's one classic study on the effect:
David Card, "The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market" (1990), http://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/mariel-impact.pdf
Quoting from the abstract: "…This paper describes the effect of the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 on the Miami labor market. The Mariel immigrants increased the Miami labor force by 7%, and the percentage increase in labor supply to less-skilled occupations and industries was even greater because most of the immigrants were relatively unskilled. Nevertheless, the Mariel influx appears to have had virtually no effect on the wages or unemployment rates of less-skilled workers…"
That's a rapid influx of 7% of Miami's population! But the effect isn't obvious to economists, either, and you can find people arguing both sides. This is a fairly balanced article: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/04/541321716/fact-check-have-low...
You would think that two income earners in a household would increase the economy enough that wages would need to rise due to a subsequent shortage of labor... but it did not.
Wages, in real terms, have largely lost purchasing power to the point where it takes two incomes to have the same (or less) purchasing power than one income did prior to WWII.
Part of it is the productivity gains made post WWII (i.e. we can do more with less labor) but a lot of it is the supply side of labor and competitive pressures pushing the price equilibrium (wages) down.
I'm not making an argument against the entry of women into the workforce. I'm an advocate for 'freedom' so I'm all for women doing what they want as long as they are following the law. My point here is the supply side of labor does not have a large enough increase to the demand side of labor to make up for the decrease in the price of wages.
I don't think that is true. Even if you exclude management jobs, hourly wages have remained roughly steady in real terms since the 1960's: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-...
There are also longitudinal effects at play: native-born Americans have seen their wages rise but this is offset by immigrants who generally have lower-than-average wages (but still higher than in the country they emigrated from). Both groups are better off even though average wages haven't changed.
Both of these things are pretty important - college education can be life altering in terms of career trajectory, and owning a house is an entry point into the wealth ladder and also simply an escape from rent. In real terms, the cost of these has runaway over the past 20-30 years and so people's access to two crucial things that aid social mobility (wealth/housing and education) have been eroding over the years. But apparently because our money can still buy a basket of goods we should be satisfied that our lives haven't gotten any worse.
For me, and I'm pretty sure it's quite complex and I am guilty of Dunning Kruger wrt politics and economics, I simply cannot understand how inflation can get away without finding a way of placing these in the basket of goods used to calculate inflation.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-property-poll/u-s-hou...
The argument I am arguing against is something like:
Immigrants join the labor force -> They increase the economy -> The increase in the economy increases jobs -> More jobs increase wages.
I think this what you are essentially saying?
The problem here is inflation and productivity. In order for everyone to prosper either:
1. There is no inflation and therefore purchasing power is maintained, or
2. Wage growth and interest rates outpace inflation.
No. 1 will not happen under our current monetary system, and no. 2 has not happened due to:
a) Competition in the labor market has keep real wage growth flat, and
b) The unprecedented (in the history of mankind) money creation (AKA Quantitative Easing) used to bail out financial institutions has destroyed interest rates and created a massive inflation in asset prices.
Another factor is that different jobs impact the economy differently. Or put another way, different jobs create different levels of 'value' in society (the monetary kind not moral kind). The difference between the price of a good or service, and the perceived value of a good or service is the 'consumer surplus'.
Fact is, highly skilled immigration is going to create a higher level of consumer surplus compared to low skilled immigration. Highly skilled immigration in areas where there are shortages is going to also have a bigger impact on economic growth.
I think you will be hard pressed to find anyone arguing against this sort of immigration... the issue that dare not be spoken is the impact low skilled and illegal immigration has on the labor market.
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.
One thing is for sure, housing prices would skyrocket!
Sure, in the hypothetical of instantaneously doubling the population without any time for the market to adjust for increased demand. But if the population doubles over the course of 30 years? That's only about 11 million people a year, the market would expect and adjust to the influx of people easily. Governments would also ideally be devising initiatives and changing policy to promote affordable housing. The high cost of housing in the US is its own issue anyway.
For example: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/source_i...
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.
source: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/frequently-requested...
It used to be that these were low paying jobs, packed with immigrants. Since you need a social security number to work, and we’re rather good at finding people who cheat the system, illegal immigration workers isn’t really a thing in factories. But the system and legalization was still exploited so paying immigrants less was possible.
Anyway eventually regulation caught up and ended the low pay loopholes. So now a job at those factories pays half a million kroner a year, or more than I earn as a senior IT-architect.
As a result a lot of our slaughtering houses moved production and enrichment out of the country, but the really interesting thing is the fishing factories. They couldn’t move or outsource production because they need to be located close to where the fish are caught.
Despite the pay hike they still can’t hire enough people without relying on immigration. It turned out that nobody wanted those jobs, even when they pay really well.
Ps. Im not sure what fishing factories and slaughtering houses are called in English but I hope you get the point.
I think this is an important point that many people seem to gloss over when discussing what humans _deserve_ to be paid.
Many believe the uniqueness of a skill set or how much physical stress is inherent to a position should be the only factors which increase a salary.
But the point you highlight here says that the amount of soul-crushing misery a position entails should also play a significant role when determining salaries.
It seems that in many countries, companies can get away with paying soul-crushing positions so terribly because so many people are coerced into these jobs--forced to choose between incredibly soul-crushing, low paying positions or watch their families starve, become homeless, not be able to afford medical care etc...
Which leads me to wonder if there are any societal changes we could make in order to nudge salaries to reflect when a job is mentally abusive. Similar to how pay typically reflects when a job is physically abusive.
I'm guessing Denmark has a decent safety net which forces companies to actually factor in mental abuse of a position when they're formulating salaries which ensures their citizens are compensated accordingly?
A basic income would work here. If people aren't forced to take a job out of economic necessity then unpleasant jobs will need to pay more to attract people to do them.
How so? To artificially keep salaries high?
I would have no problem with producing locally where it makes sense, but not to avoid minimum legal standards for wages (or for that matter for other things like environment).
It’s not just that it’s hard labour either, it’s also that handling fish is extremely low prestige.
So the story is more about the nuances and complicated nature of the job market. It’s easy to blame immigration, and it’s not like immigration doesn’t have an impact, it’s just that there are a lot more forces at play.
I don't know. No one else does either.
In fact, the suggestion that tosser00001's main point had anything to do with silly internet points is a minimization/redirection tactic that is itself a more important instance of the very thing being complained about.
Ironically, your post also contains zero evidence for your claims.
Just because it improves the economy doesn't mean it's improved the lives of all people in it. With the detachment of wage growth from economic growth in recent decades you can probably expect people to stop caring about what's good for the economy altogether pretty soon, economic growth is just an abstract number disassociated from the reality of most.
And you think immigrants are responsible for this?
Or are they simply being used as a sacrificial scapegoat because nobody wants to address the raging inequality in the West?
Yeah, it was immigrants who engineered the massive Reagan-era tax burden shift off of elites and on to the working class (and subsequent downward tax burden shifts under Bush 43 and Trump which reinforced the effects of the Reagan shifts.)
Entirely? No. Partially? Yes.
Most notably immigration has a huge impact on housing and the ever increasing demand for it. This alone is responsible for much of the fall in living standards.
Do you have any evidence at all for this claim or is this just something you made up out of thin air?
I mean, no offense, but I remember when Brexiters were claiming the same [1] earlier this year and it was quickly proven to be nonsense.
Maybe you can do a better job?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/13/housing-mini...
I need a citation for "more people == more housing demand"?
I really don't care what academics say about the cause because they're divorced from reality. The reality is that as a single, well payed software developer with no kids I'm now on the downward slope of paying off the mortgage of my small studio apartment. My father at the same age had 2 kids, a stay at home wife and was on the downward slope of paying off their 4 bedroom house with a huge yard and a pool, all on a minimum wage job.
Yet economists keep telling us how much richer this generation is.
"More people => more housing demand", ceteris paribus, is trivial. And ceteris is probably sufficiently paribus that it follows even in reality. But your claim wasn't "more housing demand" but "a huge impact", and we've established nothing about sizes.
> I really don't care what academics say about the cause because they're divorced from reality...
I feel like this is unfair... We should be here for good faith discussions--not to set up arbitrary goalposts which it would seem are impossible to reach.
As an example, I posted the following a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384668 ):
"Private business was just one of several examples I gave to illustrate principles which hold across a wide range of scales of human organization.
It is straightforward to verify that they don't stop holding at nation-scale. A good place to start is Lee Kuan Yew, who's both one of the only leaders in history to preside over the entire transition from Third World to First World for millions of people, and an architect of what's currently the most open immigration policy among Chinese-majority states. Singapore is a multicultural place whose government is widely acknowledged to have one of the best technocratic track records in the world, and they spent considerable effort on trying to get immigration policy right, iterating through alternatives while deliberately taking a popularity hit; what were their conclusions?
Or what are the odds, under your stated worldview, that two of the closest things to actual open borders existing in 2018 are (i) the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, which lets almost anyone stay as long as they can support themselves ...but ranges from 74 to 81 degrees N latitude, and (ii) the United Arab Emirates, which has more than five times as many expats as actual citizens, the largest number from India ...but ruthlessly maintains a two-tiered society, where even people who were born in the UAE and have lived there their entire lives are exceedingly unlikely to be granted citizenship unless they are Arab?
Contrary to claims that nothing like open borders has ever been tried, the existence of cases like this make it abundantly clear that this area of policy space has already been subject to substantial exploration. And every surviving result has an obvious and unusual force that does something similar to what traditional immigration controls accomplish in most countries, such as Svalbard's -40C winters. This is, to put it mildly, not a likely result if traditional immigration controls no longer have a useful function."
It may not be the final word on this subject. But it certainly points out several relevant, usually-neglected pieces of evidence. What did I get from my conversation partner as a reward? A downvote and no further response, of course; they weren't actually interested in truth or dialogue. The more I see this, the more strongly I advise everyone else to prepare to do whatever is necessary for self-defense against these people.
It seems obvious to me that fewer low skill workers would result in higher wages for those who could most benefit from it.