American workers are being treated with a measure of respect by employers for the first time in twenty years. I think that's fantastic, and well overdue. I think a lot of the fracturing of American politics in recent years has resulted from deteriorating prospects for the working class, men in particular. Now you can earn $100k driving a truck, and your employer will take seriously improving work conditions as well.
During the underemployment years of the 2010s in particular, workers were subjected to endless criticism and condescension. They're unskilled, they only want to play video games, or they're just plain lazy. America's "job creators" could do with similar treatment. They're bad at workforce management, they've under-invested in automation, or just have mediocre products that aren't viable in a tight labour market.
I love immigration and would support for any pro-immigration bill conceivable in the American political system. But given that most Americans don't share my views, I think many people will be extremely reluctant to let employers out of their current predicament with a change in immigration law.
You mention meatpacking as an industry where workers are subjected to low pay, long hours, and terrible working conditions. Yet you hold it up as a case where employers have ~tried everything~ to attract workers. This is obviously wrong. Even in a tight labor supply market, employers can attract workers in one of two ways: 1) by boosting the monetary benefits of employment or 2) by boosting the non-monetary benefits of employment.
The meatpacking industry has barely tried raising wages. The article you link to references $3,000 signing bonuses being offered to new employees. This sounds great on its face, but few rational people will be enticed by this offer. A $3,000 bonus divided by 52 weeks amounts to a pre-tax pay increase of about $58 per week. The article also states that meatpackers work 72-hour weeks. So a $3,000 bonus amounts to a pay increase of about $0.80 per hour, with that bonus lapsing after one year. You'd be hard-pressed to call this a generous compensation package.
The meatpacking industry has also done little to improve working conditions since the pandemic. When your industry has an on-the-job injury rate 3 times higher than a standard American workplace, the most effective compensation is creating a safer workplace. To do that, employers could try such novel tactics as 'reducing shift lengths', 'offering more time off', and 'providing health insurance'. These non-monetary benefits would undoubtedly help entice workers to the meatpacking industry.
I have no sympathy for employers who cry 'labor supply shortage' while maintaining terrible working conditions. People shouldn't have to spend 72 hours per week risking life and limb for $15 per hour. And although we *could* import immigrants to do these jobs, it's not clear why they should be subjected to this treatment either.
“The largest price increases were for meat categories: beef and veal prices increased by 9.6 percent, pork prices by 6.3 percent, and poultry prices by 5.6 percent.”
I wonder: Do you believe that charging higher prices for meat (the only way that producers can afford to improve working conditions) means that consumers will buy the same amount of meat? Because it doesn’t work that way.
Yes. But this comment is specifically about an industry with a bad safety record. The fact they’re struggling to hire is a sign of a healthy labour market. If America had mass migration of poor people willing to endure unsafe working conditions that would be a different story. But that’s not our reality. We’ve had 20 years of slack labour markets allowing employers to almost literally get away with murder, and I have no sympathy for them that they’re not able to get away with it any more.
I'm getting to the point where I'm going to sound like a Trumpist conspiracy nutjob, but I am rapidly losing trust in the statistics on this. I am well-acquainted with the middle and bottom of the labor market in Philadelphia through business contacts and the friends I grew up with, and the prevailing entry-level wage in late 2016 was around $8.50-9.50 an hour for "wage slave" jobs. Higher than minimum wage, but not much, and flex scheduling was a nightmare.
Now *every single menial job* starts at $14-16, offering contractual guarantees of full-time schedules or benefits starting at 25 hours/week, blah blah. I hear construction contractors complain that $18/hr is no longer a good starting wage for kids who work hard but are otherwise unskilled. There are horror stories from engineering firms I work with that are used to hiring drafters out of 2-year programs at $22/hr that they're losing candidates to warehouses because earnings are higher.
A ton of the economics research I now read sounds like "this is what we know the answer is, so we're going to slant our analysis to get there 'empirically'."
I said this somewhere else, but when we've been in a situation where productivity gains have disproportionately benefited the very top wage earners and capital for four damned decades, the road to clawing back some of those gains for ordinary folk runs through inflation, just outpaced by their wage growth.
Just to be clear ... the problem alleged here is price fixing. This has nothing to do with monopolies. Which as Ken points out ... obviously four concentrated packers is not a monopoly.
Also known as collusion or regionalized monopoly, which is *supposed* to be very closely regulated.
Funny how those regulations apply to small civil engineering and construction firms in the ASCE or PCI, lest they engage in price setting, but aren't enforced against these four firms.
If they significantly increase wages and improve working conditions then they are also going to significantly increase prices in order to pay for those changes.
But increasing prices is exactly what people are getting upset about. Increasing wages is clearly inflationary.
And we aren't "importing immigrants", immigrants are people not goods. Many people would jump at the opportunity to take these jobs. While they are much more dangerous than most jobs in America, and pay much worse, but they may be safer working conditions and pay much more than what they would get in their home countries.
"But increasing prices is exactly what people are getting upset about. Increasing wages is clearly inflationary."
When virtually all wage gains in the extremely low-inflation environment of the last forty years have gone to the professional and capital-owning classes, then yes, the process of clawing some of the vast productivity gains which have occurred in that time back from them is going to take the form of inflationary increases in pay for the bottom half or so.
It will just be outpaced by rises in wages for the working and middle classes.
I'm not terribly happy about this from the perspective of my personal finances, but let's not mistake what's happening here.
If increasing the monetary benefits of employment drives the company out of business you have not succeeded in raising wages, or improving the standard of living for consumers.
That's not true. If business X pays employees $19 to produce $20 of value, and business Y offers them $21 to produces $22 of value, business X will disappear, wages will have risen, and standards of living will have increased. That's basically what's happening with these meatpackers. They're low productivity and are struggling to compete in the market for labour.
I replied to what I thought you said but you said something else which I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying the problem for meatpacking is the workers have left the US?
I am saying that when people who are taking the jobs aren’t from the US and are trading up (as Matt implies) then they’re a net positive which makes your argument invalid
Matt acknowledges those foreign workers aren’t currently allowed to work in the US. He wants them to and I agree with him. But businesses have to face the law as it is, not as they’d like it to be. Within that constant of a semi fixed labour supply, it’s good that less productive businesses are losing workers to more productive ones, even if that means some of the less productive businesses disappear
Bit of an issue here: how does one ensure that immigrants take the crappy jobs you want them to instead of trickling into cities and underbidding longer-established residents to do “pleasant work?”
What you want, at the end of the day, is only filled by a migrant labor visa program associated with maybe 3-4 sectors. If we wanted to future-proof it, allow the Department of Labor to certify new ones based on objective criteria in the future.
As for immigration, I’m disinclined to take away labor’s bargaining leverage quite so soon. I think you’ve leapt to being overly concerned about inflationary pressures that should resolve themselves as spending transitions towards services.
My original hope, for years, was that we could increase skilled immigration to maintain dynamism while increasing bargaining power at the bottom. Unfortunately, while it might be possible to make the argument, rationally, that we need more skilled and professional immigrants… no one will accept it.
The working and middle class right is already primed to reject immigration; that nativist sentiment will hardly let them accept immigration by those who will be *above* them in the economic pecking order from day one. The professional class left, regardless of what cosmopolitan language they couch it in, want cheap construction workers and domestic help, not competition to push down their wage structures.
I think we will, in time, get back to the business of mass immigration, but a decade or two of slower immigration and faster assimilation may be what allows us to regain the social solidarity of the 40’s and 50’s and push through much-needed reforms.
This seems right. Also, before bringing in a new class of non-citizenship-track "guest workers" the right thing to do is legalize the large number of people who are already here, but trapped in legal limbo, so they can officially join the labor force. They're not going to be deported - Trump didn't really even try - but it seems the country isn't quite ready yet to admit that.
Yes but that legalization is going to require changes to the current system to prevent needing to legalize another 10 millions illegals in a couple of years.
Is there any actual evidence to support the assertion that curbing immigration led to better assimilation? And that this was a good thing? Can that even be measured?
It seems to be common knowledge, now, that the draconian, race-based immigration polices that came out of the 20's and 30's led to prosperity because it helped immigrants 'assimilate'. But this seems like propaganda from immigration restrictionists—what is assimilation? How do you measure it? How was it a good thing to let my grandparents in and then tell the rest of the family to suck a lemon? They worked their way up the economic ladder, eventually employing people to do the jobs they used to do. And, to the extent that our ethnic identity has become 'just American', it happened in the 70's and 80's, when the second and third generation prospered from the generational wealth built up from the hard work of the first.
I would counter that the years of immigration restriction overlapped with New Deal policies and that increase in immigration after WWII also coincided with a boom in technological innovation. It's not like all those scientists and engineers that flocked to the US would have done so if it meant leaving their families behind.
You also come from a STEM and research background, so you know as well as I do that using the phrase "evidence" with regards to historiography is problematic at best, but I'll give it a crack.
My argument is that the New Deal was made possible in part by the perception on the part of most Americans that the beneficiaries of these new and "expensive" policy innovations would be fellow Americans. That, in turn, was possible because the immigration reforms of the 1910's and 20's (and the economic crisis) had slowed the flow of immigrants compared to the peak of the 1870-1910 period.
Obviously, in reality the foreign-born population of the US did not begin to decline until the late 30's, but perception is king in politics. As a modern example, the perception, in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, that the government is very, very tough on illegal immigration is one of the things that allows all three countries to accept large numbers of legal immigrants.
Having read a few histories of immigration in the period, and looking at my own family's history, the theory holds water to me.
For one, the last holder of the title "Great Depression", what we now call the Long Depression, was not met by anything resembling a coherent, anti-cyclical policy response even as it dragged from the early 1870's through the 1880's. There was no strong labor pressure in favor of interventionist policies, such that big business was able to lobby for monetary policy to remain deflationary, and no pro-labor intervention was undertaken. In fact, the broad response of government was to shoot people who went on strike. Part of the reason that was tenable was that the strikers were disproportionately poor recent immigrants, while the beneficiaries of forcing them back to work at starvation wages were the native-born middle class and wealthy. There were, of course, many native-born workers as well, but from the accounts I've read the strikers were regularly stereotyped as shifty foreigners.
Meanwhile, the reduced immigration of the 1930's and 40's, followed by the crucible of WWII, really did ensure that, as I put it the other day, ethnic/hyphenated identities "became a curiosity rather than a genuine group affiliation that massively influenced people’s perception of their interests and desired policy." By 1950, even urban machine politics dispersed pork and meted out discipline along union and interest-based lines, not along the ethnic ones that were their bread and butter in the 1920's. To say nothing of the suburbs and their "melting pot for white people."
I have to disagree with the contention that that shift didn't happen until the 70's. My (old colonial British family) grandfather and (Italian immigrant family) grandmother were married at the end of the 1950's, and the limited data I've seen bears out that this was increasingly the norm at that point, even if folks still identified with their "heritage".
This blending and the solidarity it facilitated was, to my mind, the big difference between the decision to continue with New Deal and WWII-era labor-favorable policies through the post-war era, as opposed to the decision to dismantle them in the 1980's.
The latter was successful partly because of the failures of the 70's, and partly because of the hangover from the Civil Rights Movement and renewed immigration.
You definitely have to put asylum, refugee and illegal immigration in another bucket. But I agree that Americans—no matter their own family history—like to know that their tax money goes to help "people like me" and that most people's perception of immigration is completely divorced from reality and grounded in the idea of rules and enforcement. So it makes sense that convincing people that we vanquished immigration greases the skids for spending on social programs.
As for measuring assimilation, Mathew A mentions metrics that are easily obtained from things like census questions. I'm on board for quantifying it by how many people speak English at home and identify as American first. But I do think that people exaggerate the downsides of not speaking English well because most people learn language to the level necessary to do their jobs and get along in life. So immigrants that need English will learn it better than those who don't. My grandfather learned Spanish because most of the subcontractors he worked with spoke Spanish, which gave him a competitive advantage over people who just yelled "why don't you learn English!?" at them.
Thomas Frank's "The People, No!" touches on the issues you mention, of characterizing striking workers as dirty foreigners and whatnot. But he frames it as anti-populist wedge politics to prevent black, white and immigrant Labor from organizing politically, which was a constant populist threat (to the anti-populists) from the 1870's through the 1930's. The New Deal had the effect of mollifying them, which allowed the anti-populists once again to break them along ethnic, racial, geographic, etc. lines rather than class.
I mistyped earlier; I meant that the shift occurred in *my family* in the 70's and 80's. My grandparents were really the last to maintain meaningful connections to family in the old country and to participate in the ethnic communities. Their children ran away from their ethnicity and went all-in on Nixon and then Reagan. What I meant was that it only takes one generation benefiting from the hard work of the previous generation to start intermarrying and identifying as 'just American'. Being born in America is a really big part of that too, I think.
My feeling is that this concept of assimilation is mostly used to scare white suburban voters whose main exposure to immigrants is paying them cash under the table to clean their house and mow their lawns. It was probably the same dynamic in the 20's just with courser and more overtly racist language. To me, there is just no downside into letting a bunch of immigrants in to fill jobs that are otherwise not allocated optimally—whether that means unskilled laborers coming up from down South or Indians getting recruited straight out of university by Google. But I also grew up in the Bay Area, with exactly those type of people and was very used to the idea that everyone's parents spoke English with an accent or not at all.
I think we're agreeing past one another to some extent.
History is such that cause and effect are never going to be easy to parse; I certainly don't think your "New Deal sated labor and expanded the middle class far enough that capital was able to peel that coalition apart" theory is wholly wrong, I just think it's incomplete.
As for measuring assimilation, my understanding is, again, informed by my own family's history, wherein my great-great-grandparents (PA Dutch and Italian ones anyway) spoke those languages at home, were insular within their own communities, and the Italian ones in Philly were part of the patronage networks and ethnic institutions of their day in the 1920's. Whereas, by the 1950's, my great-grandparents and grandparents spoke English at home, traveled throughout the region, and the Italian branch had relocated to Montgomery and Bucks Counties, worked in unionized or civil service jobs, and intermarried with a series of non-Italian (Protestant!) families.
Sure, we still have the traditions... big family gathering for the Dinner of the Loaves and Fishes, christenings, weddings, great sauce/gravy recipes, blah blah blah. But the Italian- in front of American is a cultural signifier and nothing more.
As for that last paragraph... I've never really doubted our ability to rapidly assimilate immigrants. It's what we do, what sets us apart from almost everywhere else on the globe. I've never been concerned about the social effects of immigration itself, only its knock-on effects on politics. Perceptions matter, as you say in your first paragraph. And even those concerns are peripheral to what I understand the purely economic impacts of recent rapid immigration to be.
The US, in my estimation, is never going to be a country like those in Western Europe. At least, it won't become one until and unless we suffer through some major catastrophe that makes the great majority of the populace long for security over opportunity.
When we're at our best, we're a country in which labor gets a fair shake based on the ethos of "A fair day's pay for a hard day's work."
If we're to see that sort of world again, we need to admit that there are some pretty big tradeoffs involved in our current immigration policies and consider their impacts more objectively.
What baffles me is that the two us, and many others commenting here, have direct experience with foreign-born relatives who didn't speak English. And our experiences all point in the same direction; immigrants show up, work their way up the economic ladder (become White in the modern progressive parlance) and their kids start intermarrying. Two or three generations down the road, it's "the Italian branch of my family" and some fondness for some of the old traditions that stuck around. The same thing will happen to any immigrant group and, as it has always been, their culture will leave its mark in the process (which is a good thing).
Yet the country as a whole seems to have the attitude that their ancestors came over on the Mayflower and that immigrants are other people whose worth and value to society should be questioned. I mean, am I such a coastal elite that I just don't realize that our stories are uncommon? Or is the perception of immigration just so badly skewed by the racist drumbeat from the right about hoards of scary brown people massing at the Southern border that people on opposite sides of the immigration debate are literally using words that do not mean the same thing to each other? My cynical take is simply that the status quo bias is just too strong to overcome because of the political upside of demagoguing immigration... I just could not agree more with MY's thesis on this one and it frustrates me to no end that the national conversation is always stuck between "think of the children" and "they took our jobs".
"Yet the country as a whole seems to have the attitude that their ancestors came over on the Mayflower and that immigrants are other people whose worth and value to society should be questioned."
I actually don't believe that's the case. I think that the majority American position is that immigration on a whole is a good thing.
But it's also a majority position that we don't like illegal immigration. And that we should be able to control who gets in, and how many.
After that, I think it breaks down a bit as we argue about the how many.
Personally I think it's a slow enough rate that people have time to assimilate. This means that immigrant communities can't be too big, or I would argue it takes to long.
I'm not sure what the exact rate is, but I would also argue that our recent immigration rate has been to fact, thus some of the backlash.
"some fondness for some of the old traditions that stuck around"
As you make this comment, I'm sitting here attempting to chip torrone from a block and eat it without getting it on my keyboard as I sit through this boring, useless meeting and chat here. Sisyphean task if ever there was one.
My own thesis is that the arguments you describe against immigration only find fertile ground in times of economic dislocation. People don't really think about or question them because they want to believe them, not because they actually do.
They are, essentially, a cultural signaling mechanism used to cover up unpleasant economic realities that I think drive the argument on both sides.
I firmly believe, having lived in a "progressive" city for many years now, that most professionals on the left have no genuine commitment to "diversity" beyond that their landscaping services are cheap, they can find a good contractor for low-cost work on their houses, and the local restaurant scene has sufficient variety.
Very few of them are doing anything but virtue-signaling on the topic, judging by the ruthlessness with which they elbow aside anyone they can to get their kids into the best schools and buy up houses in the best neighborhoods far away from "diversity." This lip service is very much "free" to them because it aligns with their economic interests.
Meanwhile, given the *complete lack* of shared conclusions from the research on the topic of how immigrants impact wages, I've made the decision to read much of it... and then draw my own damned conclusions.
And I believe that high low-skilled immigration since 1970 is an important (not sole, but important) causal factor behind the decoupling of wage and productivity growth for the bottom four-fifths of the country's wage-earners.
This is not just in terms of policy, as that'd be a *downstream* effect of the sentiment we're discussion, but also in terms of concrete impact on supply and demand in the labor market.
For a few decades, the vast majority of our immigration has been low-skilled. They are absolutely competing with low-skilled American workers for employment in certain sectors, most especially construction, small-scale manufacturing, certain services... and the evidence, to me at least, is sufficient to say that they are helping to suppress wage growth.
Honestly, this economic effect has probably always been the case, but only now is it the case that it's occurring after we thought we'd brought class conflict to an end and ensured a decent standard of living for workers. There was literally a period in the 50's and 60's during which we stopped using the term "working class" and thought of them as part of the same continuum as professional workers and small business owners.
The reaction to that seems pretty damned obvious, if you ask me. But in American politics it's considered gauche to talk about how policy matters impact us directly, rather than trying to frame them as being in line or out of line with our ideals and our culture, so our national debate on immigration is basically a massive bout of mutual concern trolling. No one actually believes what they're saying on either side.
A good place to start is what language is spoken in the home. Next maybe questions like do you still think of yourself as a person from your home country, or as an American.
For example, my grand parents immigrated from Denmark. When my dad was a kid he learned Danish and German. But over time it was dropped. As a kid we just learned English.
So it probably took 10-20 years for assimilation to take place. If more intensive immigration has taken place from Denmark that process probably would have been slowed. If everyone around you is speaking Danish, then English uptake is probably slower.
That's a good definition. I want to add intermarriage as another critical marker and accelerant. Groups that assimilate the fastest almost invariably have high rates of intermarriage, whereas the opposite is crucial for non-assimilation (Amish, Hasidic Jews, Blacks and Whites in the deep south until recently, etc...).
I think your brain is still stuck in the mode of deficient demand. The type of underbidding competition you discuss is only possible when the supply of labor is greater than demand for labor, giving employers bargaining power. In the current economy, most sectors can expand output with additional labor inputs, meaning immigrant competition should not substitute for domestic labor.
We’re talking about a unique confluence of circumstances that has reduced labor force participation. I don’t believe it durable, and I also believe a lot of inflation (the portion not due to non-labor constraints like chips for cars and zoning for imputed rent) is due to a change in consumption’s balance between goods and services, which will resolve itself within a year.
I think MY has overreacted to his precious dovish takes on inflation by suggesting more hawkish policy alterations that are likely to have permanent effects, ones I don’t think are genuinely good for the majority of American citizens.
But aren't you assuming the unprecedented 3% shrinkage of the labor force during the pandemic is permanent? Who's to say it is? Those people didn't die, they weren't raptured, etc. Most of them are still here and presumably can rejoin the labor force whenever they want to, assuming there are jobs available.
I think the shrinkage is likely there for at least another year, but I also think you missed the part where we've actually decreased what would otherwise be the natural flow of immigrants pretty dramatically. So while the drop in workforce is only 3%, the drop from trend is getting larger and larger as we continue to restrict immigration.
This seems bizarre. You don't actually want a decrease in unskilled labor. What you really want is for them to have higher wages and the way you see to do that is by decreasing supply. However, this requires that the consumption of the good/service is inelastic and there are few substitutes available for either the good/service or the labor. Otherwise, all your doing is decreasing the number of people in that industry because it will no longer support that level of use. If wages rise in the meatpacking industry, but the majority of the industry moves out of the country in order to improve its cost effectiveness, would you consider that a win?
The primary response, for the last two or three centuries, to sectoral labor shortages has been automation and process improvement, which has for most of that period resulted in a rising standard of living for those who remain in the sector.
This was first seen in agriculture, piling people into industrial work for shit wages while those still in agriculture saw their standard of living rise. It then filtered into industry sector-by-sector, until we see such modern "absurdities" as the US producing as many cars as in 1960 with a sixth the workers.
The problem is that, somewhere in the last 40 years, the mechanisms by which productivity gains filtered back primarily to labor and secondarily to capital have been entirely short-circuited in the United States in the latter's favor.
One of the mechanisms by which that was achieved was the toleration of, by developed world standards, very high levels of illegal immigration.
That has actually lowered productivity growth, as capital (the class) has less reason to invest in capital (the concept), whether that's automation, process improvement, or R&D. The number of menial positions which have (unjustifiably to my mind) been touted as automation-proof has been inflated vastly to provide rhetorical leverage in favor of mass unskilled immigration.
In the short-term, I agree, transitioning the several sectors in the US that still utilize a high-labor, low-capital model towards the opposite will be quite painful for them and for Americans as consumers. I'm sure that the upper-middle classes bitched incessantly behind closed doors about the end of cheap domestic help in 1940 as the Depression rolled to a close and their domestics went to work in factories for better pay. Then, "suddenly", there was a washing machine in every household in 1950.
Christ knows I hear professional class Chinese families bitch all the time about how expensive maids are becoming as they finally drain the rural labor pool to the dregs.
But in the long-term, the endless streams of cheap immigrant workers coupled with broadly anti-labor policies have been quite harmful to the interests of the body politic as a whole. Neither the market nor fiat have dictated that a "fair" share of income goes to the bottom 40-60%, allowing the top 5-10% to capture a disproportionate fraction of the gains of the last 40 years in the form of increased pay, high returns on invested capital, and extremely low inflation.
If more competition for a smaller pool of labor ends with those industries employing fewer but better-paid and more heavily capitalized workers, great!
Thank Christ the GOP is going to stumble ass-backwards into pro-worker immigration policy thanks to stupid nativism.
Now, if only they'd let skilled workers in in the numbers we need to pump up aggregate demand...
Thinking about this more, I have to admit I find this whole take nonsensical.
Damned near half (47%) of the CPI basket is down to imputed or real rent, energy costs, and vehicle prices, all of which have gone batshit insane. They're now responsible for three-quarters of inflation, which means the other half of the basket is averaging about 3.1% YoY.
Removing that half of it, while not good from a "look how normal inflation is!" point of view in politics, does give us some insight into what we should be doing to fix the situation, if anything.
And that view should basically tell us that labor constraints *aren't* the main driver here, because removing them will NOT fix any of the three things which are actually behind the headline inflation number being so high.
Of the three, housing's issues are caused by artificial policy constraints, energy's by underinvestment, and vehicles by a very serious procurement error that will take another 6-8 months to really fix.
Do we really want to start making policy in only peripherally-related fields on the basis of sheer panic?
There are degrees of pleasant. Construction jobs is one area, for example, where immigrants labor does compete with those born here for low skilled jobs that, depending on unionization and other labor condition factors, sometimes pay a middle class wage.
Having done all of agricultural, service, and construction labor, I’m going to call bullshit.
Folks who are not restricted from free participation in labor markets will *not* end up in agricultural jobs if service ones exist, and many or most able-bodied young immigrants will not go to service jobs if construction is booming.
Once upon a time I learned that immigration has little to no impact on native-born wages while making the nation richer. Great!
But now we're in a situation where workers feel much freer to quit their jobs and look for something better and wages for lower-income workers are growing faster than inflation, and that's a perfect time to look towards increased immigration to fight this emerging threat of inflation which has allowed . . . workers to feel much freer to quit their jobs and look for something better and for wages for lower-income workers to grow faster than inflation.
If indeed we're having spot shortages in field workers and meatpackers, sure, OK.
But for me the real lesson is don't offer what is a wise *long-term* approach (One Billion Americans!) as some kind of solution for short-term challenges in the economy.
This sentence is the key to answering your comment:
"But the problem with immigration curbs as an economic development strategy is that telling unemployed former factory workers in Ohio, “don’t worry, we fixed your problems by getting rid of the immigrants, so now you can go be a berry-picker in California” doesn’t make sense."
We cut the foreign workers out who were doing the work native born Americans didn't want to do. Since we cut those workers out, these employers have raised wages to attempt to attract native born workers: and they aren't getting takers at double the original going rate. This makes this (previously profitable business) unprofitable, increases costs, AND doesn't even help the native born workers since they're not taking the jobs anyway.
As Matt said: this is not a catchall solution to our macroeconomic problems, but it can be a partial solution to short term problems which are directly hampering us economically now. Inflation is real and a lack of supply of labor is part of the reason why, and the good news is that problem is entirely fixable.
There is so much wrong with this that's it hard to know where to start. You also conveniently ignored the second sentence:
"This makes this (previously profitable business) unprofitable, increases costs, AND doesn't even help the native born workers since they're not taking the jobs anyway."
If the firm doesn't make money: then there won't be any jobs to have at all.
As for this comment: "Honestly, guys picking berries in California produce more value than the median lawyer does"
I agree with all of this. I just added several thousand dollars to GDP with a small house repair job using, I'm pretty sure, an all undocumented-worker crew after trying for weeks to find a regular contractor to do the work. It was a win for both parties and for the life of me I can't see how it is any skin off the back of my FB friends who are anti-immigration.
However, this is not where the big gains from immigration reside. I want, over time, to attract millions of engineers, and doctors, and nurses, and researchers, and skilled workers of all sorts, and students who will stay after their degrees. That's the way we get our total GDP back up above China's while improving our own standard of living. [Note to Republicans: these are are your upwardly mobile natural constituency.]
Agreed, but let me tweak this just a little. If we admitted huge numbers of highly skilled immigrants, they'd become a natural constituency for pre-Trump conservative politics--not for the GOP in its current form. And admitting high-skill instead of low-skill immigrants would *reduce* the appeal of Trump Republicanism for native-born whites. You'd get a broadly healthier form of politics on the right.
I think this is more or less how Canadian politics works, with wealthy migrants from China and elsewhere becoming a significant base of support for the Conservative Party.
The trouble is that they don't see much incentive to change their current strategy, which has led to surprising inroads among *downscale* minorities. I think this reflects anti-black racism among some Asians and Hispanics, as well as the tendency of low-information voters to be more vulnerable to disinformation.
As always, this brings me back to my theme song. For many different reasons we shouldn't admit migrants without college degrees, except on a contract basis.
This reads like anti-black racism and disinformation are the only 2 possible motivations for supporting the GOP. I know some people do think that, but it's a fairly extreme view.
I think traditional views on gender roles are a much, much bigger motivating factor for conservative politics among non-black POCs today than racism is.
There are a lot of Hispanic people who are cops and border patrol agents. It's a good job with good pay.
Immigration is also not the clear winning issue Democrats pretend it is- Chicanos are the workers who have to compete with new arrivals and get mad about it.
They're not, but it's a question of rates versus levels. Nonwhite support for the GOP used to be pretty low, but since Trump took over it's risen somewhat. To explain that I think you have to look at the elements of conservative strategy that became more important under Trump, not the ones that were de-emphasized or that remained unchanged.
That's a great framework. But as a framework I think it's missing applying the same lens to the Democratic party - what has become more important to the Dems that might turn off long time voters? Two obvious examples are covid and defund the police, neither of which rely on disinformation or racism. Neither does trans-rights issues. Also the increasing ivory-tower messaging and "Lawyer-brain" legislating, which have steadily increased on the left.
On the right, giving up on the Paul Ryan medicare / SSN strategy is a major change under Trump that has little to do with misinformation / racism. Same could be said for protectionist trade strategies.
Not to mention - that's a pretty out there theme song as well. If you're going to go that route limit it to just STEM degrees. A plumber is just as likely to be productive as a communications major.
That's true. But although I don't have the numbers in front of me, I think the polling data from 2020 showed very large GOP gains with Hispanics and much smaller ones for blacks.
Asians are still too small a group to be broken out in most polls, so it's hard to say, but I suspect the trends there are similar to trends for Hispanics.
That depends on location. California for example has twice the population of Asian as Black. A bigger issue is that Blacks vote very much as a block, while Asians aren't nearly as cohesive.
it's hard to parse Asian-specific numbers as you said, but my read of the scant evidence is the trends has been in-between that of Hispanics and Blacks but closer to Blacks.
But yea, I’m plugged into the Asian immigrant communities here enough that I have a lot of exposure to this.
I think 1 and 3-7 are very understandable.
8. is and always will be completely incomprehensible to me. Trump is a rich idiot who earned a return well under that available from an index fund on a vast sum of inherited money.
2. I find quite untrue, at least among Asian immigrants.
Well, I'd frame it this way. The hypothetical question you want to ask is: "Would public opinion in the US accept a policy of open borders for all college graduates from overseas?"
If the answer is yes, then you should do that, and to the extent the public is willing to take in even more people you'd want some non-college immigrants as well.
But actually I think unlimited immigration for college grads is already more than the voters would accept. So the next best thing is to admit as many college grads as is politically feasible--which implies not admitting non-graduates if it can be avoided, because they "crowd out" more skilled migrants if the total volume is maxed.
There's nothing magical about a BA and obviously you'd want to make exceptions for certain groups, like spouses of US citizens or people with legitimate asylum claims. But policymakers should keep in mind that this issue involves a political "budget constraint": if you bring in a lower-skilled migrant you're probably excluding a higher-skilled migrant who also wanted to come, and that's a suboptimal outcome.
Bringing in more nurses in particular is such a no-brainer. There's a massive nursing shortage all over the country at both the RN and LPN levels, which is causing all kinds of problems. There used to be special visa categories for nurses (H-1A, H-1C) but Congress in its infinite wisdom let those expire a long time ago. I *believe* it's still easier to get a Green Card as a nurse, but you're still subject to the overall limits on green cards.
Here is my thought - I’ve noticed customer service declining as the balance of power between employees and customers has changed. I think that’s a very good thing. I think a lot of the political rancor has come from people feeling weak and ignored by society. They now have more confidence and feel more respected.
I really don’t think increasing the number of people competing for jobs is a good idea. The management class should always operate terrified their employees are going to walk out.
Couple of points about farm trade and productivity.
First, the US is part of NAFTA or USMCA or whatever. Mexican veg and soft fruit exports to the US are booming. Lots of investment (by US agribusiness) in Mexico and other countries. Tomato production moved to Mexico over the last few decades. Chances are good salad items will too. The avocado industry is slowly migrating to points south. This is all pretty efficient.
Second, famers can invest in capital equipment to produce more with less labor. I watch the crews harvesting the strawberry beds in Monterey, all neatly laid out on the ground. Back-breaking work and all credit to the workers who do it. But you can also grow strawberries hydroponically in greenhouses on raised tables. You'll get more strawberries. I see this done in developing economies where labor costs are ten times lower than around Salinas. Happy to be put right, but doesn't look as if anything has changed in Salinas production methods in fifty years.
Maybe take out the strawberries and plant 100% zucchini? Sorting agri production requires many variables - not least micro-climate and water availability - but I am not sure trying to perpetuate production in one place by providing cheaper than market labor is a wise intervention.
You end up with highly concentrated supply chains that undercut local businesses based on access to - and management of - cheap labor. Like the meat-packing supply chain. Which I think we can all agree is not a desirable place to end up.
There's a number of low wage countries to our south that are so lacking in jobs their people come here to take jobs that "Americans won't do", at least not at economically viable wages. Any of those industries that can relocate production further south to Central America to where the workers are, should, instead of bringing the workers here, which destabilizes our politics and gives rise to demagoguery like Trump's wall. It's a win-win. (And now we even have an integrated railroad network that runs from Mexico to Canada, to move the products.)
If industries could have relocated to where the cheap workers are, they would have already. Those "low wage countries to our south" "are so lacking in jobs" for a reason: they're governed poorly. You can't run a business if you can't enforce your contracts, you have to hedge your payment methods against hyperinflation, or you need to pay all your profit to the mob for "security."
Yes those are problems but it's not really true that if they could have moved, they already would have. As noted above, agricultural production in fact has been moving south, mostly to Mexico, but it's not an overnight process. If the post-pandemic labor shortage in the US accelerates that trend, that's a good thing, not something we should intervene to prevent.
I’m not putting strawberries in what should be blueberry pancakes. Also: If you ever see zucchini bread French toast with bourbon-maple-butter sauce and French vanilla ice cream on a dessert menu, have the zucchini.
I will never stop slowly boring the hard board of Matt's support for admitting low-skilled immigrants on a permanent basis.
There's a lot to be said for bringing in low-skilled *temporary* labor, as long as it's confined to designated sectors of the economy where the goal is to keep wages below what Americans would accept: so far below that no native workers are being displaced and the gain to employers/consumers is maximized. This is how Hong Kong and Singapore supply themselves with affordable domestic servants, and it would make sense for seasonal agricultural work as well.
(I'd add that Singapore does one thing Hong Kong doesn't: they impose a lifetime two-year cap on any individual foreign maid working in country, so that they don't put down roots. It may seem harsh but one beneficial side effect is that *more people* in poor Asian countries benefit from the opportunity to earn higher incomes, though each for a shorter period of time. I'd like to see temporary agricultural visas granted on the same basis and restricted to the neediest source countries: Haiti rather than Mexico.)
If we're talking about immigration with a path to citizenship, then I'll go back to my old tune. Bringing in a strawberry picker is beneficial but bringing in a scientist is *more* beneficial, so if there's a practical constraint on the total volume of permanent legal immigration then you should only admit the highly skilled.
This is basically the system in Australia and it works extremely well. It's hard to hate immigrants when they've just paid $100k over asking for your house.
(Australia has 2x America's foreign born population with a fraction of the anti-immigrant hysteria)
I keep saying this! People accuse Australians of being unusually racist because they have a zero-tolerance policy for undocumented arrivals, but in that case it's hard to understand why they allow so much legal immigration. I suspect that voters in most developed countries would like to see asylum-seekers treated with no mercy, as they are in Australia. The only real difference is that in Australia the government does what the median voter wants it to do.
I think this reflects a couple of peculiarities of Australia's electoral system: voting is mandatory, and they use a combination of ranked-choice voting and proportional representation for parliamentary elections. That allows for cross-party consensus on taking a hard line with undocumented migrants. Woke voters may not like the fact that the Labour Party is part of the consensus (in fact Labour brought in the current system), but they can't successfully undermine the party by voting Green or staying home.
I did some googling. It's hard to find comparable statistics, but I think the answer is native born Australians. This is possible due to a mix of higher prices, and simply not having equivalents to the parts of the US Ag sector that depend on very low wages.
A plan for more immigrants to ease labor shortages might help Democrats split business interests from Trumpy Republicans but isn't likely to help Democrats with more downscale Americans. So, a further step in the transformation of the Democratic Party into the party of the well-to-do, managerial and professional classes, ie., what the Republican Party used to be.
I was going to write something cynical like "Great idea, Matt. Too bad there's a not a snowball's chance in hell something along these lines gets done!" but then I thought I'd better do a quick search before spouting off. I mean, maybe something *will* be done for all I know. And sure enough the NY Times published an article detailing the administration's apparently rather serious plans for undoing the damage Trump did to US immigration programs, plus some improvements and initiatives beyond the repair work. Don't know the status of these plans, but here's to hoping...
I think there is room for a bipartisan grand bargain on immigration, specifically because there is an extant policy proposal which would be an obvious, highly visible concession to Republicans without compromising Democrats' key aims. Basically, I think you could pass a bipartisan bill that:
-expands legal immigration
-provides a pathway to citizenship for people in the country without documentation
-limits the powers of the president to unilaterally make changes to immigration policy, in a way that would forbid both future Muslim Bans and future DACA/DAPAs (the latter being the only way I think Republicans would accept the former)
-sets new legally binding guidance on Border Patrol treatment of minors and families, while increasing their funding to make sure it can be implemented even during a surge of attempted border crossings or asylum claims
-funds some other additional enforcement that actually works, focused on preventing people from overstaying visas, and
-funds Trump's wall. (I'm concerned about issues of eminent domain, Native lands, and wildlife corridors, but the point is not to actually build the whole wall, which is a dumbass idea; the point is to build enough for Republicans to be able to *say* they built the wall, and almost every Republican knows it.)
Republicans won't sign on unless the bill visibly and publicly owns the libs, which this would clearly do. Democrats care enough about achieving the comprehensive immigration reform aims they've been hoping for for the entire 20th century that they'll swallow it. In fact this would be effective triangulation, because moderate Republicans who vote for the bargain would be able to say in a GOP primary that they voted to fulfill Trump's chief campaign promise and made Squad members furious, and maybe in future GOP presidential primaries, say "I voted for the wall, and you didn't". Once Republicans retake Congress they won't schedule votes on immigration reform at all, so now is the time to do this.
Moderate Dems might have read Shor and be of the opinion that touching immigration at all is a loser for them, but here's the thing: you can't say that out loud to voters, who expect you to be working on every issue that's in the news. If you do a bipartisan bill that nauseates leftists, you can sell it to your district/state as a border enforcement/security bill.
Trump handed immigration doves a huge, huge gift on this one: a visible way to make a concession that doesn't compromise any of our core goals, because it's a bullshit policy that does nothing. We'd be crazy not to take it.
Reducing American inequality is more important than cheap strawberries. MY ignores the single best effect of the recent inflation: wages for low paid jobs have increased much faster than those for better jobs. We are reducing inequality for the first time in decades, and MY is more worried about holding the line on berry prices than paying our neediest workers a living wage.
Redistribution is unlikely to correct the inequality immigration brings to our shores. Will middle class taxpayers care about good public schools when the students are mostly immigrants? How popular would SCHIP become if it is seen as a subsidy for the foreign born? Who would want to pay child allowances that go overwhelmingly to “those people.” For 170 years, ethnic jealousies have stunted working class solidarity. MY gives us a fine formula for continuing that.
Inflation is at 6% and McDonald's announced on its most recent earnings call that wages are up 10%. I don't think we know how the labor shortage is going to impact returns to capital vs. labor. If history is any guide returns to capital will fall.
I’m going to need some data here too. Even if we take headline inflation at face value, the folks at the bottom of the scale have seen pay go up by wayyyy more than 5-6% over the last year.
Except that wage growth tends to stick around and much of the inflation (supply side) is transitory. So long term we may well see reductions in economic inequality.
Inflation that isn't transitory is almost by definition wage inflation. If you run an economy too hot (there are not enough people for the positions to be filled) then companies keep offering raises and workers keep moving from company to company for more money. This means that inflation continues until you restrain your economic growth.
Other types of inflation are generally transitory. They may require a year (e.g. companies need time to open a new production facility to increase production). They may just training workers for new jobs or even customers reallocating their buying decisions.
You could conceivably have non-transitory inflation that wasn't wage related (e.g. permanent climate change made it impossible to grow the amount of foodstuff we could previously). I don't think anyone is arguing that this type-of-thing is what's going on.
your “caveat” concedes much of point. the people who were making $12 an hour who are now making $15 have seen real wags growth.
I used to pay my assistant $21. Now I pay $30. That’s real wage growth. It’s put a pinch in my profits, but I support a world where paralegals get a bigger slice of the pie and attorneys get a smaller one
Yea, I know this is bad form, but I am seeing such a mass of individual anecdotal evidence that says "wage growth for the lowest-paid work is much higher than 5%" that I simply cannot regard this data as credible.
So... that can't completely be true or we wouldn't have this post asking for them to come in and "suppress" wages. Or the mechanism is more complicated.
Basic mechanism: We don't want to / can't afford to pay native-born
meatpackers/strawberry pickers more money because that would push strawberry/meat prices higher. But we can get immigrants to do the job for less money. That would seem to be pushing down wages.
Except I guess:
1) If the job simply _isn't_ worth it for more money, then the higher wage doesn't even exist as a possibility, so having someone come in and do it for less isn't really depressing wages, because the higher-wage job doesn't exist.
2) Having immigrants come in and do those jobs might depress wages somewhat _in that sector_ but it opens up additional jobs for the native-born at higher wages (more restaurants selling burgers & fruit)?
(Also, I thought there was still some dispute on the wages thing - where _most_ economists thought it didn't, but Borjas etc thought it did and it wasn't 100% clear-cut either way)
Its remarkable how many people are trying to make xenophobia sound progressive here. I think regardless of what matt or anyone says, people will just have a hard time trusting strangers, and people who like immigration have to cope with that.
if you define xenophobia as wanting to keep foreigners out then immigration restriction is xenophobic. that begs the question of whether this particular xenophic policy is bad.
being xenophobic is only a demerit to the extent it is an irrational or prejudiced fear of foreigners. if i simply want to exclude foreigners because i prefer greater equality and solidarity within my country, certainly there is no shame in that.
Well, *this* takes bad faith arguments and “playing the person” to a new level.
My wife is an immigrant. I couldn’t give less of a flying *fuck* whether immigration is a progressive value or not, and I’ve never once considered myself a progressive.
But I certainly take offense at being called a xenophobe or bigot because I believe the preponderance of evidence says mass low-skilled immigration constrains wage growth for working class citizens.
As I thought I made clear above, I do not give a damn about the open borders crowd. I don't care about their conception of morality, don't care about their opinions, don't care about their screeching and whining and sobbing, don't care about their protests and marches.
I stand with the vast majority of Americans (and people worldwide) in maintaining that nation-states, borders, sovereignty, citizenship, and the responsibilities of a government to its people have meaning, and the tiny minority who believe otherwise can fuck off.
All they accomplish is to poison "the left" with pie-in-the-sky bullshit and self-interested virtue signaling at the expense of solidarity, healthy patriotism, and the mutual obligations of citizenship.
The only concession I will grant them is that the US should not enforce immigration law by cosplaying Gestapo at and near the border. It is gratuitously cruel, immoral, and ineffective.
It should instead implement and enforce an e-verify system for all employers with punitive penalties. Then use the disruption to illustrate the need for a pathway to citizenship for long-time residents, and set the amount and balance of legal immigration that best serves American interests going forward.
2) if that’s true, then much of inflation had nothing to do with labor. if labor is 80% of the value of a product and it gets 5% more expensive, that would explain a 4% (.8*.05) increase in the price. whenever prices increase faster than labor costs, there are also other factors driving the increase
It seems like there's a strong consensus that allowing more immigration is good but very little legislative appetite for it... obviously the right has gone fully anti-immigration and the pro-immigration corporate types are now marginalized in the party. Meanwhile on the left there's hardly any focus on increasing legal immigration... A sad state of affairs.
Democrats are kind of in a bind here -- it feels like whenever whenever there are big surges in asylum seekers, it becomes really hard to push through other kinds of immigration.
(It'd help if the Chamber of Commerce or whatever would bother to push Republicans more to support increases in the number of visas we give out.)
American workers are being treated with a measure of respect by employers for the first time in twenty years. I think that's fantastic, and well overdue. I think a lot of the fracturing of American politics in recent years has resulted from deteriorating prospects for the working class, men in particular. Now you can earn $100k driving a truck, and your employer will take seriously improving work conditions as well.
During the underemployment years of the 2010s in particular, workers were subjected to endless criticism and condescension. They're unskilled, they only want to play video games, or they're just plain lazy. America's "job creators" could do with similar treatment. They're bad at workforce management, they've under-invested in automation, or just have mediocre products that aren't viable in a tight labour market.
I love immigration and would support for any pro-immigration bill conceivable in the American political system. But given that most Americans don't share my views, I think many people will be extremely reluctant to let employers out of their current predicament with a change in immigration law.
You mention meatpacking as an industry where workers are subjected to low pay, long hours, and terrible working conditions. Yet you hold it up as a case where employers have ~tried everything~ to attract workers. This is obviously wrong. Even in a tight labor supply market, employers can attract workers in one of two ways: 1) by boosting the monetary benefits of employment or 2) by boosting the non-monetary benefits of employment.
The meatpacking industry has barely tried raising wages. The article you link to references $3,000 signing bonuses being offered to new employees. This sounds great on its face, but few rational people will be enticed by this offer. A $3,000 bonus divided by 52 weeks amounts to a pre-tax pay increase of about $58 per week. The article also states that meatpackers work 72-hour weeks. So a $3,000 bonus amounts to a pay increase of about $0.80 per hour, with that bonus lapsing after one year. You'd be hard-pressed to call this a generous compensation package.
The meatpacking industry has also done little to improve working conditions since the pandemic. When your industry has an on-the-job injury rate 3 times higher than a standard American workplace, the most effective compensation is creating a safer workplace. To do that, employers could try such novel tactics as 'reducing shift lengths', 'offering more time off', and 'providing health insurance'. These non-monetary benefits would undoubtedly help entice workers to the meatpacking industry.
I have no sympathy for employers who cry 'labor supply shortage' while maintaining terrible working conditions. People shouldn't have to spend 72 hours per week risking life and limb for $15 per hour. And although we *could* import immigrants to do these jobs, it's not clear why they should be subjected to this treatment either.
“The largest price increases were for meat categories: beef and veal prices increased by 9.6 percent, pork prices by 6.3 percent, and poultry prices by 5.6 percent.”
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-price-outlook/summary-findings/
I wonder: Do you believe that charging higher prices for meat (the only way that producers can afford to improve working conditions) means that consumers will buy the same amount of meat? Because it doesn’t work that way.
Yes. That’s good. Unethical industries should shrink in favour of one’s that don’t frequently maim their workers
Stop eating meat, then. And rejoice when low-income families can no longer afford food.
Free market at work. Deal with it. Stop making up nonsense about how Americans must starve if the meat packers maim fewer employees
“Deal with it.”
I can afford to. But I am not as cavalier as you are about those who cannot.
It’s just not true the only way to feed the poor is by having people injured in meat packing plants
Yes. But this comment is specifically about an industry with a bad safety record. The fact they’re struggling to hire is a sign of a healthy labour market. If America had mass migration of poor people willing to endure unsafe working conditions that would be a different story. But that’s not our reality. We’ve had 20 years of slack labour markets allowing employers to almost literally get away with murder, and I have no sympathy for them that they’re not able to get away with it any more.
That does not mean inflation is not a problem.
I'm getting to the point where I'm going to sound like a Trumpist conspiracy nutjob, but I am rapidly losing trust in the statistics on this. I am well-acquainted with the middle and bottom of the labor market in Philadelphia through business contacts and the friends I grew up with, and the prevailing entry-level wage in late 2016 was around $8.50-9.50 an hour for "wage slave" jobs. Higher than minimum wage, but not much, and flex scheduling was a nightmare.
Now *every single menial job* starts at $14-16, offering contractual guarantees of full-time schedules or benefits starting at 25 hours/week, blah blah. I hear construction contractors complain that $18/hr is no longer a good starting wage for kids who work hard but are otherwise unskilled. There are horror stories from engineering firms I work with that are used to hiring drafters out of 2-year programs at $22/hr that they're losing candidates to warehouses because earnings are higher.
A ton of the economics research I now read sounds like "this is what we know the answer is, so we're going to slant our analysis to get there 'empirically'."
I said this somewhere else, but when we've been in a situation where productivity gains have disproportionately benefited the very top wage earners and capital for four damned decades, the road to clawing back some of those gains for ordinary folk runs through inflation, just outpaced by their wage growth.
Just to be clear ... the problem alleged here is price fixing. This has nothing to do with monopolies. Which as Ken points out ... obviously four concentrated packers is not a monopoly.
No but it sounds like oligopoly. Which can definitely have monopolistic attributes (or not, it depends on how they compete)
It sounds more like they've shifted the market power by consolidating the demand vs. a fragmented supply base. Smart move.
Also known as collusion or regionalized monopoly, which is *supposed* to be very closely regulated.
Funny how those regulations apply to small civil engineering and construction firms in the ASCE or PCI, lest they engage in price setting, but aren't enforced against these four firms.
LoL, monopolies.
If they significantly increase wages and improve working conditions then they are also going to significantly increase prices in order to pay for those changes.
But increasing prices is exactly what people are getting upset about. Increasing wages is clearly inflationary.
And we aren't "importing immigrants", immigrants are people not goods. Many people would jump at the opportunity to take these jobs. While they are much more dangerous than most jobs in America, and pay much worse, but they may be safer working conditions and pay much more than what they would get in their home countries.
"But increasing prices is exactly what people are getting upset about. Increasing wages is clearly inflationary."
When virtually all wage gains in the extremely low-inflation environment of the last forty years have gone to the professional and capital-owning classes, then yes, the process of clawing some of the vast productivity gains which have occurred in that time back from them is going to take the form of inflationary increases in pay for the bottom half or so.
It will just be outpaced by rises in wages for the working and middle classes.
I'm not terribly happy about this from the perspective of my personal finances, but let's not mistake what's happening here.
overall agreed. But I don't see how providing health insurance would lower rates of injury.
Also, depending on the plan offered health insurance is a $20kish a year raise
If increasing the monetary benefits of employment drives the company out of business you have not succeeded in raising wages, or improving the standard of living for consumers.
That's not true. If business X pays employees $19 to produce $20 of value, and business Y offers them $21 to produces $22 of value, business X will disappear, wages will have risen, and standards of living will have increased. That's basically what's happening with these meatpackers. They're low productivity and are struggling to compete in the market for labour.
Not when the people who were filling those roles are taking jobs outside the country
I replied to what I thought you said but you said something else which I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying the problem for meatpacking is the workers have left the US?
I am saying that when people who are taking the jobs aren’t from the US and are trading up (as Matt implies) then they’re a net positive which makes your argument invalid
Matt acknowledges those foreign workers aren’t currently allowed to work in the US. He wants them to and I agree with him. But businesses have to face the law as it is, not as they’d like it to be. Within that constant of a semi fixed labour supply, it’s good that less productive businesses are losing workers to more productive ones, even if that means some of the less productive businesses disappear
Bit of an issue here: how does one ensure that immigrants take the crappy jobs you want them to instead of trickling into cities and underbidding longer-established residents to do “pleasant work?”
What you want, at the end of the day, is only filled by a migrant labor visa program associated with maybe 3-4 sectors. If we wanted to future-proof it, allow the Department of Labor to certify new ones based on objective criteria in the future.
As for immigration, I’m disinclined to take away labor’s bargaining leverage quite so soon. I think you’ve leapt to being overly concerned about inflationary pressures that should resolve themselves as spending transitions towards services.
My original hope, for years, was that we could increase skilled immigration to maintain dynamism while increasing bargaining power at the bottom. Unfortunately, while it might be possible to make the argument, rationally, that we need more skilled and professional immigrants… no one will accept it.
The working and middle class right is already primed to reject immigration; that nativist sentiment will hardly let them accept immigration by those who will be *above* them in the economic pecking order from day one. The professional class left, regardless of what cosmopolitan language they couch it in, want cheap construction workers and domestic help, not competition to push down their wage structures.
I think we will, in time, get back to the business of mass immigration, but a decade or two of slower immigration and faster assimilation may be what allows us to regain the social solidarity of the 40’s and 50’s and push through much-needed reforms.
This seems right. Also, before bringing in a new class of non-citizenship-track "guest workers" the right thing to do is legalize the large number of people who are already here, but trapped in legal limbo, so they can officially join the labor force. They're not going to be deported - Trump didn't really even try - but it seems the country isn't quite ready yet to admit that.
Yes but that legalization is going to require changes to the current system to prevent needing to legalize another 10 millions illegals in a couple of years.
Is there any actual evidence to support the assertion that curbing immigration led to better assimilation? And that this was a good thing? Can that even be measured?
It seems to be common knowledge, now, that the draconian, race-based immigration polices that came out of the 20's and 30's led to prosperity because it helped immigrants 'assimilate'. But this seems like propaganda from immigration restrictionists—what is assimilation? How do you measure it? How was it a good thing to let my grandparents in and then tell the rest of the family to suck a lemon? They worked their way up the economic ladder, eventually employing people to do the jobs they used to do. And, to the extent that our ethnic identity has become 'just American', it happened in the 70's and 80's, when the second and third generation prospered from the generational wealth built up from the hard work of the first.
I would counter that the years of immigration restriction overlapped with New Deal policies and that increase in immigration after WWII also coincided with a boom in technological innovation. It's not like all those scientists and engineers that flocked to the US would have done so if it meant leaving their families behind.
You also come from a STEM and research background, so you know as well as I do that using the phrase "evidence" with regards to historiography is problematic at best, but I'll give it a crack.
My argument is that the New Deal was made possible in part by the perception on the part of most Americans that the beneficiaries of these new and "expensive" policy innovations would be fellow Americans. That, in turn, was possible because the immigration reforms of the 1910's and 20's (and the economic crisis) had slowed the flow of immigrants compared to the peak of the 1870-1910 period.
Obviously, in reality the foreign-born population of the US did not begin to decline until the late 30's, but perception is king in politics. As a modern example, the perception, in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, that the government is very, very tough on illegal immigration is one of the things that allows all three countries to accept large numbers of legal immigrants.
Having read a few histories of immigration in the period, and looking at my own family's history, the theory holds water to me.
For one, the last holder of the title "Great Depression", what we now call the Long Depression, was not met by anything resembling a coherent, anti-cyclical policy response even as it dragged from the early 1870's through the 1880's. There was no strong labor pressure in favor of interventionist policies, such that big business was able to lobby for monetary policy to remain deflationary, and no pro-labor intervention was undertaken. In fact, the broad response of government was to shoot people who went on strike. Part of the reason that was tenable was that the strikers were disproportionately poor recent immigrants, while the beneficiaries of forcing them back to work at starvation wages were the native-born middle class and wealthy. There were, of course, many native-born workers as well, but from the accounts I've read the strikers were regularly stereotyped as shifty foreigners.
Meanwhile, the reduced immigration of the 1930's and 40's, followed by the crucible of WWII, really did ensure that, as I put it the other day, ethnic/hyphenated identities "became a curiosity rather than a genuine group affiliation that massively influenced people’s perception of their interests and desired policy." By 1950, even urban machine politics dispersed pork and meted out discipline along union and interest-based lines, not along the ethnic ones that were their bread and butter in the 1920's. To say nothing of the suburbs and their "melting pot for white people."
I have to disagree with the contention that that shift didn't happen until the 70's. My (old colonial British family) grandfather and (Italian immigrant family) grandmother were married at the end of the 1950's, and the limited data I've seen bears out that this was increasingly the norm at that point, even if folks still identified with their "heritage".
This blending and the solidarity it facilitated was, to my mind, the big difference between the decision to continue with New Deal and WWII-era labor-favorable policies through the post-war era, as opposed to the decision to dismantle them in the 1980's.
The latter was successful partly because of the failures of the 70's, and partly because of the hangover from the Civil Rights Movement and renewed immigration.
You definitely have to put asylum, refugee and illegal immigration in another bucket. But I agree that Americans—no matter their own family history—like to know that their tax money goes to help "people like me" and that most people's perception of immigration is completely divorced from reality and grounded in the idea of rules and enforcement. So it makes sense that convincing people that we vanquished immigration greases the skids for spending on social programs.
As for measuring assimilation, Mathew A mentions metrics that are easily obtained from things like census questions. I'm on board for quantifying it by how many people speak English at home and identify as American first. But I do think that people exaggerate the downsides of not speaking English well because most people learn language to the level necessary to do their jobs and get along in life. So immigrants that need English will learn it better than those who don't. My grandfather learned Spanish because most of the subcontractors he worked with spoke Spanish, which gave him a competitive advantage over people who just yelled "why don't you learn English!?" at them.
Thomas Frank's "The People, No!" touches on the issues you mention, of characterizing striking workers as dirty foreigners and whatnot. But he frames it as anti-populist wedge politics to prevent black, white and immigrant Labor from organizing politically, which was a constant populist threat (to the anti-populists) from the 1870's through the 1930's. The New Deal had the effect of mollifying them, which allowed the anti-populists once again to break them along ethnic, racial, geographic, etc. lines rather than class.
I mistyped earlier; I meant that the shift occurred in *my family* in the 70's and 80's. My grandparents were really the last to maintain meaningful connections to family in the old country and to participate in the ethnic communities. Their children ran away from their ethnicity and went all-in on Nixon and then Reagan. What I meant was that it only takes one generation benefiting from the hard work of the previous generation to start intermarrying and identifying as 'just American'. Being born in America is a really big part of that too, I think.
My feeling is that this concept of assimilation is mostly used to scare white suburban voters whose main exposure to immigrants is paying them cash under the table to clean their house and mow their lawns. It was probably the same dynamic in the 20's just with courser and more overtly racist language. To me, there is just no downside into letting a bunch of immigrants in to fill jobs that are otherwise not allocated optimally—whether that means unskilled laborers coming up from down South or Indians getting recruited straight out of university by Google. But I also grew up in the Bay Area, with exactly those type of people and was very used to the idea that everyone's parents spoke English with an accent or not at all.
I think we're agreeing past one another to some extent.
History is such that cause and effect are never going to be easy to parse; I certainly don't think your "New Deal sated labor and expanded the middle class far enough that capital was able to peel that coalition apart" theory is wholly wrong, I just think it's incomplete.
As for measuring assimilation, my understanding is, again, informed by my own family's history, wherein my great-great-grandparents (PA Dutch and Italian ones anyway) spoke those languages at home, were insular within their own communities, and the Italian ones in Philly were part of the patronage networks and ethnic institutions of their day in the 1920's. Whereas, by the 1950's, my great-grandparents and grandparents spoke English at home, traveled throughout the region, and the Italian branch had relocated to Montgomery and Bucks Counties, worked in unionized or civil service jobs, and intermarried with a series of non-Italian (Protestant!) families.
Sure, we still have the traditions... big family gathering for the Dinner of the Loaves and Fishes, christenings, weddings, great sauce/gravy recipes, blah blah blah. But the Italian- in front of American is a cultural signifier and nothing more.
As for that last paragraph... I've never really doubted our ability to rapidly assimilate immigrants. It's what we do, what sets us apart from almost everywhere else on the globe. I've never been concerned about the social effects of immigration itself, only its knock-on effects on politics. Perceptions matter, as you say in your first paragraph. And even those concerns are peripheral to what I understand the purely economic impacts of recent rapid immigration to be.
The US, in my estimation, is never going to be a country like those in Western Europe. At least, it won't become one until and unless we suffer through some major catastrophe that makes the great majority of the populace long for security over opportunity.
When we're at our best, we're a country in which labor gets a fair shake based on the ethos of "A fair day's pay for a hard day's work."
If we're to see that sort of world again, we need to admit that there are some pretty big tradeoffs involved in our current immigration policies and consider their impacts more objectively.
What baffles me is that the two us, and many others commenting here, have direct experience with foreign-born relatives who didn't speak English. And our experiences all point in the same direction; immigrants show up, work their way up the economic ladder (become White in the modern progressive parlance) and their kids start intermarrying. Two or three generations down the road, it's "the Italian branch of my family" and some fondness for some of the old traditions that stuck around. The same thing will happen to any immigrant group and, as it has always been, their culture will leave its mark in the process (which is a good thing).
Yet the country as a whole seems to have the attitude that their ancestors came over on the Mayflower and that immigrants are other people whose worth and value to society should be questioned. I mean, am I such a coastal elite that I just don't realize that our stories are uncommon? Or is the perception of immigration just so badly skewed by the racist drumbeat from the right about hoards of scary brown people massing at the Southern border that people on opposite sides of the immigration debate are literally using words that do not mean the same thing to each other? My cynical take is simply that the status quo bias is just too strong to overcome because of the political upside of demagoguing immigration... I just could not agree more with MY's thesis on this one and it frustrates me to no end that the national conversation is always stuck between "think of the children" and "they took our jobs".
"Yet the country as a whole seems to have the attitude that their ancestors came over on the Mayflower and that immigrants are other people whose worth and value to society should be questioned."
I actually don't believe that's the case. I think that the majority American position is that immigration on a whole is a good thing.
But it's also a majority position that we don't like illegal immigration. And that we should be able to control who gets in, and how many.
After that, I think it breaks down a bit as we argue about the how many.
Personally I think it's a slow enough rate that people have time to assimilate. This means that immigrant communities can't be too big, or I would argue it takes to long.
I'm not sure what the exact rate is, but I would also argue that our recent immigration rate has been to fact, thus some of the backlash.
"some fondness for some of the old traditions that stuck around"
As you make this comment, I'm sitting here attempting to chip torrone from a block and eat it without getting it on my keyboard as I sit through this boring, useless meeting and chat here. Sisyphean task if ever there was one.
My own thesis is that the arguments you describe against immigration only find fertile ground in times of economic dislocation. People don't really think about or question them because they want to believe them, not because they actually do.
They are, essentially, a cultural signaling mechanism used to cover up unpleasant economic realities that I think drive the argument on both sides.
I firmly believe, having lived in a "progressive" city for many years now, that most professionals on the left have no genuine commitment to "diversity" beyond that their landscaping services are cheap, they can find a good contractor for low-cost work on their houses, and the local restaurant scene has sufficient variety.
Very few of them are doing anything but virtue-signaling on the topic, judging by the ruthlessness with which they elbow aside anyone they can to get their kids into the best schools and buy up houses in the best neighborhoods far away from "diversity." This lip service is very much "free" to them because it aligns with their economic interests.
Meanwhile, given the *complete lack* of shared conclusions from the research on the topic of how immigrants impact wages, I've made the decision to read much of it... and then draw my own damned conclusions.
And I believe that high low-skilled immigration since 1970 is an important (not sole, but important) causal factor behind the decoupling of wage and productivity growth for the bottom four-fifths of the country's wage-earners.
This is not just in terms of policy, as that'd be a *downstream* effect of the sentiment we're discussion, but also in terms of concrete impact on supply and demand in the labor market.
For a few decades, the vast majority of our immigration has been low-skilled. They are absolutely competing with low-skilled American workers for employment in certain sectors, most especially construction, small-scale manufacturing, certain services... and the evidence, to me at least, is sufficient to say that they are helping to suppress wage growth.
Honestly, this economic effect has probably always been the case, but only now is it the case that it's occurring after we thought we'd brought class conflict to an end and ensured a decent standard of living for workers. There was literally a period in the 50's and 60's during which we stopped using the term "working class" and thought of them as part of the same continuum as professional workers and small business owners.
The reaction to that seems pretty damned obvious, if you ask me. But in American politics it's considered gauche to talk about how policy matters impact us directly, rather than trying to frame them as being in line or out of line with our ideals and our culture, so our national debate on immigration is basically a massive bout of mutual concern trolling. No one actually believes what they're saying on either side.
"what is assimilation? How do you measure it"
A good place to start is what language is spoken in the home. Next maybe questions like do you still think of yourself as a person from your home country, or as an American.
For example, my grand parents immigrated from Denmark. When my dad was a kid he learned Danish and German. But over time it was dropped. As a kid we just learned English.
So it probably took 10-20 years for assimilation to take place. If more intensive immigration has taken place from Denmark that process probably would have been slowed. If everyone around you is speaking Danish, then English uptake is probably slower.
That's a good definition. I want to add intermarriage as another critical marker and accelerant. Groups that assimilate the fastest almost invariably have high rates of intermarriage, whereas the opposite is crucial for non-assimilation (Amish, Hasidic Jews, Blacks and Whites in the deep south until recently, etc...).
I think your brain is still stuck in the mode of deficient demand. The type of underbidding competition you discuss is only possible when the supply of labor is greater than demand for labor, giving employers bargaining power. In the current economy, most sectors can expand output with additional labor inputs, meaning immigrant competition should not substitute for domestic labor.
We’re talking about a unique confluence of circumstances that has reduced labor force participation. I don’t believe it durable, and I also believe a lot of inflation (the portion not due to non-labor constraints like chips for cars and zoning for imputed rent) is due to a change in consumption’s balance between goods and services, which will resolve itself within a year.
I think MY has overreacted to his precious dovish takes on inflation by suggesting more hawkish policy alterations that are likely to have permanent effects, ones I don’t think are genuinely good for the majority of American citizens.
But aren't you assuming the unprecedented 3% shrinkage of the labor force during the pandemic is permanent? Who's to say it is? Those people didn't die, they weren't raptured, etc. Most of them are still here and presumably can rejoin the labor force whenever they want to, assuming there are jobs available.
I think the shrinkage is likely there for at least another year, but I also think you missed the part where we've actually decreased what would otherwise be the natural flow of immigrants pretty dramatically. So while the drop in workforce is only 3%, the drop from trend is getting larger and larger as we continue to restrict immigration.
I’m going to require quite a bit of convincing that this decrease in unskilled labor immigration is not a good thing in the short-term.
Skilled labor, sure, come join us!
This seems bizarre. You don't actually want a decrease in unskilled labor. What you really want is for them to have higher wages and the way you see to do that is by decreasing supply. However, this requires that the consumption of the good/service is inelastic and there are few substitutes available for either the good/service or the labor. Otherwise, all your doing is decreasing the number of people in that industry because it will no longer support that level of use. If wages rise in the meatpacking industry, but the majority of the industry moves out of the country in order to improve its cost effectiveness, would you consider that a win?
You're reversing cause and effect, here.
The primary response, for the last two or three centuries, to sectoral labor shortages has been automation and process improvement, which has for most of that period resulted in a rising standard of living for those who remain in the sector.
This was first seen in agriculture, piling people into industrial work for shit wages while those still in agriculture saw their standard of living rise. It then filtered into industry sector-by-sector, until we see such modern "absurdities" as the US producing as many cars as in 1960 with a sixth the workers.
The problem is that, somewhere in the last 40 years, the mechanisms by which productivity gains filtered back primarily to labor and secondarily to capital have been entirely short-circuited in the United States in the latter's favor.
One of the mechanisms by which that was achieved was the toleration of, by developed world standards, very high levels of illegal immigration.
That has actually lowered productivity growth, as capital (the class) has less reason to invest in capital (the concept), whether that's automation, process improvement, or R&D. The number of menial positions which have (unjustifiably to my mind) been touted as automation-proof has been inflated vastly to provide rhetorical leverage in favor of mass unskilled immigration.
In the short-term, I agree, transitioning the several sectors in the US that still utilize a high-labor, low-capital model towards the opposite will be quite painful for them and for Americans as consumers. I'm sure that the upper-middle classes bitched incessantly behind closed doors about the end of cheap domestic help in 1940 as the Depression rolled to a close and their domestics went to work in factories for better pay. Then, "suddenly", there was a washing machine in every household in 1950.
Christ knows I hear professional class Chinese families bitch all the time about how expensive maids are becoming as they finally drain the rural labor pool to the dregs.
But in the long-term, the endless streams of cheap immigrant workers coupled with broadly anti-labor policies have been quite harmful to the interests of the body politic as a whole. Neither the market nor fiat have dictated that a "fair" share of income goes to the bottom 40-60%, allowing the top 5-10% to capture a disproportionate fraction of the gains of the last 40 years in the form of increased pay, high returns on invested capital, and extremely low inflation.
If more competition for a smaller pool of labor ends with those industries employing fewer but better-paid and more heavily capitalized workers, great!
Thank Christ the GOP is going to stumble ass-backwards into pro-worker immigration policy thanks to stupid nativism.
Now, if only they'd let skilled workers in in the numbers we need to pump up aggregate demand...
Just to amplify on this:
Thinking about this more, I have to admit I find this whole take nonsensical.
Damned near half (47%) of the CPI basket is down to imputed or real rent, energy costs, and vehicle prices, all of which have gone batshit insane. They're now responsible for three-quarters of inflation, which means the other half of the basket is averaging about 3.1% YoY.
Removing that half of it, while not good from a "look how normal inflation is!" point of view in politics, does give us some insight into what we should be doing to fix the situation, if anything.
And that view should basically tell us that labor constraints *aren't* the main driver here, because removing them will NOT fix any of the three things which are actually behind the headline inflation number being so high.
Of the three, housing's issues are caused by artificial policy constraints, energy's by underinvestment, and vehicles by a very serious procurement error that will take another 6-8 months to really fix.
Do we really want to start making policy in only peripherally-related fields on the basis of sheer panic?
There are degrees of pleasant. Construction jobs is one area, for example, where immigrants labor does compete with those born here for low skilled jobs that, depending on unionization and other labor condition factors, sometimes pay a middle class wage.
Having done all of agricultural, service, and construction labor, I’m going to call bullshit.
Folks who are not restricted from free participation in labor markets will *not* end up in agricultural jobs if service ones exist, and many or most able-bodied young immigrants will not go to service jobs if construction is booming.
OK, I'm lost.
Once upon a time I learned that immigration has little to no impact on native-born wages while making the nation richer. Great!
But now we're in a situation where workers feel much freer to quit their jobs and look for something better and wages for lower-income workers are growing faster than inflation, and that's a perfect time to look towards increased immigration to fight this emerging threat of inflation which has allowed . . . workers to feel much freer to quit their jobs and look for something better and for wages for lower-income workers to grow faster than inflation.
If indeed we're having spot shortages in field workers and meatpackers, sure, OK.
But for me the real lesson is don't offer what is a wise *long-term* approach (One Billion Americans!) as some kind of solution for short-term challenges in the economy.
This sentence is the key to answering your comment:
"But the problem with immigration curbs as an economic development strategy is that telling unemployed former factory workers in Ohio, “don’t worry, we fixed your problems by getting rid of the immigrants, so now you can go be a berry-picker in California” doesn’t make sense."
We cut the foreign workers out who were doing the work native born Americans didn't want to do. Since we cut those workers out, these employers have raised wages to attempt to attract native born workers: and they aren't getting takers at double the original going rate. This makes this (previously profitable business) unprofitable, increases costs, AND doesn't even help the native born workers since they're not taking the jobs anyway.
As Matt said: this is not a catchall solution to our macroeconomic problems, but it can be a partial solution to short term problems which are directly hampering us economically now. Inflation is real and a lack of supply of labor is part of the reason why, and the good news is that problem is entirely fixable.
There is so much wrong with this that's it hard to know where to start. You also conveniently ignored the second sentence:
"This makes this (previously profitable business) unprofitable, increases costs, AND doesn't even help the native born workers since they're not taking the jobs anyway."
If the firm doesn't make money: then there won't be any jobs to have at all.
As for this comment: "Honestly, guys picking berries in California produce more value than the median lawyer does"
I find this laughable
Because regulations are necessary to have a functioning society and it takes training to be a lawyer. Anyone can pick berries
I agree with all of this. I just added several thousand dollars to GDP with a small house repair job using, I'm pretty sure, an all undocumented-worker crew after trying for weeks to find a regular contractor to do the work. It was a win for both parties and for the life of me I can't see how it is any skin off the back of my FB friends who are anti-immigration.
However, this is not where the big gains from immigration reside. I want, over time, to attract millions of engineers, and doctors, and nurses, and researchers, and skilled workers of all sorts, and students who will stay after their degrees. That's the way we get our total GDP back up above China's while improving our own standard of living. [Note to Republicans: these are are your upwardly mobile natural constituency.]
Agreed, but let me tweak this just a little. If we admitted huge numbers of highly skilled immigrants, they'd become a natural constituency for pre-Trump conservative politics--not for the GOP in its current form. And admitting high-skill instead of low-skill immigrants would *reduce* the appeal of Trump Republicanism for native-born whites. You'd get a broadly healthier form of politics on the right.
I think this is more or less how Canadian politics works, with wealthy migrants from China and elsewhere becoming a significant base of support for the Conservative Party.
The trouble is that they don't see much incentive to change their current strategy, which has led to surprising inroads among *downscale* minorities. I think this reflects anti-black racism among some Asians and Hispanics, as well as the tendency of low-information voters to be more vulnerable to disinformation.
As always, this brings me back to my theme song. For many different reasons we shouldn't admit migrants without college degrees, except on a contract basis.
This reads like anti-black racism and disinformation are the only 2 possible motivations for supporting the GOP. I know some people do think that, but it's a fairly extreme view.
I think traditional views on gender roles are a much, much bigger motivating factor for conservative politics among non-black POCs today than racism is.
There are a lot of Hispanic people who are cops and border patrol agents. It's a good job with good pay.
Immigration is also not the clear winning issue Democrats pretend it is- Chicanos are the workers who have to compete with new arrivals and get mad about it.
Yes, that hardly seems fair. Other motivations for supporting the GOP are "lack of patriotism" and a general hatred of America. \s
They're not, but it's a question of rates versus levels. Nonwhite support for the GOP used to be pretty low, but since Trump took over it's risen somewhat. To explain that I think you have to look at the elements of conservative strategy that became more important under Trump, not the ones that were de-emphasized or that remained unchanged.
That's a great framework. But as a framework I think it's missing applying the same lens to the Democratic party - what has become more important to the Dems that might turn off long time voters? Two obvious examples are covid and defund the police, neither of which rely on disinformation or racism. Neither does trans-rights issues. Also the increasing ivory-tower messaging and "Lawyer-brain" legislating, which have steadily increased on the left.
On the right, giving up on the Paul Ryan medicare / SSN strategy is a major change under Trump that has little to do with misinformation / racism. Same could be said for protectionist trade strategies.
Not to mention - that's a pretty out there theme song as well. If you're going to go that route limit it to just STEM degrees. A plumber is just as likely to be productive as a communications major.
I dunno. I’ve never called a communications major and asked if he could possibly come over ASAP.
The Republican party has done better with black people too over the past few years, especially black men
That's true. But although I don't have the numbers in front of me, I think the polling data from 2020 showed very large GOP gains with Hispanics and much smaller ones for blacks.
Asians are still too small a group to be broken out in most polls, so it's hard to say, but I suspect the trends there are similar to trends for Hispanics.
That depends on location. California for example has twice the population of Asian as Black. A bigger issue is that Blacks vote very much as a block, while Asians aren't nearly as cohesive.
it's hard to parse Asian-specific numbers as you said, but my read of the scant evidence is the trends has been in-between that of Hispanics and Blacks but closer to Blacks.
" think this reflects anti-black racism among some Asians and Hispanics"
Or maybe they just don't like the racist rhetoric of the woke/progressive left?
You forgot:
9. Seriously devout religious beliefs.
But yea, I’m plugged into the Asian immigrant communities here enough that I have a lot of exposure to this.
I think 1 and 3-7 are very understandable.
8. is and always will be completely incomprehensible to me. Trump is a rich idiot who earned a return well under that available from an index fund on a vast sum of inherited money.
2. I find quite untrue, at least among Asian immigrants.
Well, I'd frame it this way. The hypothetical question you want to ask is: "Would public opinion in the US accept a policy of open borders for all college graduates from overseas?"
If the answer is yes, then you should do that, and to the extent the public is willing to take in even more people you'd want some non-college immigrants as well.
But actually I think unlimited immigration for college grads is already more than the voters would accept. So the next best thing is to admit as many college grads as is politically feasible--which implies not admitting non-graduates if it can be avoided, because they "crowd out" more skilled migrants if the total volume is maxed.
There's nothing magical about a BA and obviously you'd want to make exceptions for certain groups, like spouses of US citizens or people with legitimate asylum claims. But policymakers should keep in mind that this issue involves a political "budget constraint": if you bring in a lower-skilled migrant you're probably excluding a higher-skilled migrant who also wanted to come, and that's a suboptimal outcome.
Bringing in more nurses in particular is such a no-brainer. There's a massive nursing shortage all over the country at both the RN and LPN levels, which is causing all kinds of problems. There used to be special visa categories for nurses (H-1A, H-1C) but Congress in its infinite wisdom let those expire a long time ago. I *believe* it's still easier to get a Green Card as a nurse, but you're still subject to the overall limits on green cards.
Here is my thought - I’ve noticed customer service declining as the balance of power between employees and customers has changed. I think that’s a very good thing. I think a lot of the political rancor has come from people feeling weak and ignored by society. They now have more confidence and feel more respected.
I really don’t think increasing the number of people competing for jobs is a good idea. The management class should always operate terrified their employees are going to walk out.
>>I’ve noticed customer service declining as the balance of power between employees and customers has changed. I think that’s a very good thing.<<
That's an awesome hot take.
If you want employees to fake pleasantness to belligerent customers, pay them more.
Amen!
Couple of points about farm trade and productivity.
First, the US is part of NAFTA or USMCA or whatever. Mexican veg and soft fruit exports to the US are booming. Lots of investment (by US agribusiness) in Mexico and other countries. Tomato production moved to Mexico over the last few decades. Chances are good salad items will too. The avocado industry is slowly migrating to points south. This is all pretty efficient.
Second, famers can invest in capital equipment to produce more with less labor. I watch the crews harvesting the strawberry beds in Monterey, all neatly laid out on the ground. Back-breaking work and all credit to the workers who do it. But you can also grow strawberries hydroponically in greenhouses on raised tables. You'll get more strawberries. I see this done in developing economies where labor costs are ten times lower than around Salinas. Happy to be put right, but doesn't look as if anything has changed in Salinas production methods in fifty years.
Maybe take out the strawberries and plant 100% zucchini? Sorting agri production requires many variables - not least micro-climate and water availability - but I am not sure trying to perpetuate production in one place by providing cheaper than market labor is a wise intervention.
You end up with highly concentrated supply chains that undercut local businesses based on access to - and management of - cheap labor. Like the meat-packing supply chain. Which I think we can all agree is not a desirable place to end up.
There's a number of low wage countries to our south that are so lacking in jobs their people come here to take jobs that "Americans won't do", at least not at economically viable wages. Any of those industries that can relocate production further south to Central America to where the workers are, should, instead of bringing the workers here, which destabilizes our politics and gives rise to demagoguery like Trump's wall. It's a win-win. (And now we even have an integrated railroad network that runs from Mexico to Canada, to move the products.)
If industries could have relocated to where the cheap workers are, they would have already. Those "low wage countries to our south" "are so lacking in jobs" for a reason: they're governed poorly. You can't run a business if you can't enforce your contracts, you have to hedge your payment methods against hyperinflation, or you need to pay all your profit to the mob for "security."
Yes those are problems but it's not really true that if they could have moved, they already would have. As noted above, agricultural production in fact has been moving south, mostly to Mexico, but it's not an overnight process. If the post-pandemic labor shortage in the US accelerates that trend, that's a good thing, not something we should intervene to prevent.
"Maybe take out the strawberries and plant 100% zucchini?"
I'm not putting zucchini on what should be strawberry pancakes
I’m not putting strawberries in what should be blueberry pancakes. Also: If you ever see zucchini bread French toast with bourbon-maple-butter sauce and French vanilla ice cream on a dessert menu, have the zucchini.
Banana bread does all the things that zucchini bread does, just better.
There's blueberries in the pancakes, but stawberries go on top
If you ever go to Paula's pancake house in Solvang CA, get the strawberry pancakes. Thank me latter
I will never stop slowly boring the hard board of Matt's support for admitting low-skilled immigrants on a permanent basis.
There's a lot to be said for bringing in low-skilled *temporary* labor, as long as it's confined to designated sectors of the economy where the goal is to keep wages below what Americans would accept: so far below that no native workers are being displaced and the gain to employers/consumers is maximized. This is how Hong Kong and Singapore supply themselves with affordable domestic servants, and it would make sense for seasonal agricultural work as well.
(I'd add that Singapore does one thing Hong Kong doesn't: they impose a lifetime two-year cap on any individual foreign maid working in country, so that they don't put down roots. It may seem harsh but one beneficial side effect is that *more people* in poor Asian countries benefit from the opportunity to earn higher incomes, though each for a shorter period of time. I'd like to see temporary agricultural visas granted on the same basis and restricted to the neediest source countries: Haiti rather than Mexico.)
If we're talking about immigration with a path to citizenship, then I'll go back to my old tune. Bringing in a strawberry picker is beneficial but bringing in a scientist is *more* beneficial, so if there's a practical constraint on the total volume of permanent legal immigration then you should only admit the highly skilled.
This is basically the system in Australia and it works extremely well. It's hard to hate immigrants when they've just paid $100k over asking for your house.
(Australia has 2x America's foreign born population with a fraction of the anti-immigrant hysteria)
I keep saying this! People accuse Australians of being unusually racist because they have a zero-tolerance policy for undocumented arrivals, but in that case it's hard to understand why they allow so much legal immigration. I suspect that voters in most developed countries would like to see asylum-seekers treated with no mercy, as they are in Australia. The only real difference is that in Australia the government does what the median voter wants it to do.
I think this reflects a couple of peculiarities of Australia's electoral system: voting is mandatory, and they use a combination of ranked-choice voting and proportional representation for parliamentary elections. That allows for cross-party consensus on taking a hard line with undocumented migrants. Woke voters may not like the fact that the Labour Party is part of the consensus (in fact Labour brought in the current system), but they can't successfully undermine the party by voting Green or staying home.
> The only real difference is that in Australia the government does what the median voter wants it to do.
How terrible and... undemocratic? Wait hang on
Incidentally, who does the farm work in Australia? I know New Zealand brings in temps from the Pacific Islands... does Australia do that too?
I did some googling. It's hard to find comparable statistics, but I think the answer is native born Australians. This is possible due to a mix of higher prices, and simply not having equivalents to the parts of the US Ag sector that depend on very low wages.
A plan for more immigrants to ease labor shortages might help Democrats split business interests from Trumpy Republicans but isn't likely to help Democrats with more downscale Americans. So, a further step in the transformation of the Democratic Party into the party of the well-to-do, managerial and professional classes, ie., what the Republican Party used to be.
I was going to write something cynical like "Great idea, Matt. Too bad there's a not a snowball's chance in hell something along these lines gets done!" but then I thought I'd better do a quick search before spouting off. I mean, maybe something *will* be done for all I know. And sure enough the NY Times published an article detailing the administration's apparently rather serious plans for undoing the damage Trump did to US immigration programs, plus some improvements and initiatives beyond the repair work. Don't know the status of these plans, but here's to hoping...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/31/us/politics/biden-immigration.html
Remember, the first rule of Secret Congress is you do not talk about Secret Congress!
I think there is room for a bipartisan grand bargain on immigration, specifically because there is an extant policy proposal which would be an obvious, highly visible concession to Republicans without compromising Democrats' key aims. Basically, I think you could pass a bipartisan bill that:
-expands legal immigration
-provides a pathway to citizenship for people in the country without documentation
-limits the powers of the president to unilaterally make changes to immigration policy, in a way that would forbid both future Muslim Bans and future DACA/DAPAs (the latter being the only way I think Republicans would accept the former)
-sets new legally binding guidance on Border Patrol treatment of minors and families, while increasing their funding to make sure it can be implemented even during a surge of attempted border crossings or asylum claims
-funds some other additional enforcement that actually works, focused on preventing people from overstaying visas, and
-funds Trump's wall. (I'm concerned about issues of eminent domain, Native lands, and wildlife corridors, but the point is not to actually build the whole wall, which is a dumbass idea; the point is to build enough for Republicans to be able to *say* they built the wall, and almost every Republican knows it.)
Republicans won't sign on unless the bill visibly and publicly owns the libs, which this would clearly do. Democrats care enough about achieving the comprehensive immigration reform aims they've been hoping for for the entire 20th century that they'll swallow it. In fact this would be effective triangulation, because moderate Republicans who vote for the bargain would be able to say in a GOP primary that they voted to fulfill Trump's chief campaign promise and made Squad members furious, and maybe in future GOP presidential primaries, say "I voted for the wall, and you didn't". Once Republicans retake Congress they won't schedule votes on immigration reform at all, so now is the time to do this.
Moderate Dems might have read Shor and be of the opinion that touching immigration at all is a loser for them, but here's the thing: you can't say that out loud to voters, who expect you to be working on every issue that's in the news. If you do a bipartisan bill that nauseates leftists, you can sell it to your district/state as a border enforcement/security bill.
Trump handed immigration doves a huge, huge gift on this one: a visible way to make a concession that doesn't compromise any of our core goals, because it's a bullshit policy that does nothing. We'd be crazy not to take it.
Reducing American inequality is more important than cheap strawberries. MY ignores the single best effect of the recent inflation: wages for low paid jobs have increased much faster than those for better jobs. We are reducing inequality for the first time in decades, and MY is more worried about holding the line on berry prices than paying our neediest workers a living wage.
Redistribution is unlikely to correct the inequality immigration brings to our shores. Will middle class taxpayers care about good public schools when the students are mostly immigrants? How popular would SCHIP become if it is seen as a subsidy for the foreign born? Who would want to pay child allowances that go overwhelmingly to “those people.” For 170 years, ethnic jealousies have stunted working class solidarity. MY gives us a fine formula for continuing that.
Real wages are falling for all groups because of inflation! Making everyone’s quality of life worse isn’t a great way to solve inequality.
Inflation is at 6% and McDonald's announced on its most recent earnings call that wages are up 10%. I don't think we know how the labor shortage is going to impact returns to capital vs. labor. If history is any guide returns to capital will fall.
Are McDonalds wages up 10% or are their wage rates up 10%?
I’m going to need some data here too. Even if we take headline inflation at face value, the folks at the bottom of the scale have seen pay go up by wayyyy more than 5-6% over the last year.
Here you go: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1458493043661807616. There is a second chart Matt tweeted showing wage growth for under-25s up by like 10% (https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1458494618614517764/photo/1) so I should add a caveat that some people are seeing real wages grow but I think it's still fair to say that most people are not.
Except that wage growth tends to stick around and much of the inflation (supply side) is transitory. So long term we may well see reductions in economic inequality.
"much of the inflation (supply side) is transitory"
They've been arguing that the inflation is transitory for a while now, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Inflation that isn't transitory is almost by definition wage inflation. If you run an economy too hot (there are not enough people for the positions to be filled) then companies keep offering raises and workers keep moving from company to company for more money. This means that inflation continues until you restrain your economic growth.
Other types of inflation are generally transitory. They may require a year (e.g. companies need time to open a new production facility to increase production). They may just training workers for new jobs or even customers reallocating their buying decisions.
You could conceivably have non-transitory inflation that wasn't wage related (e.g. permanent climate change made it impossible to grow the amount of foodstuff we could previously). I don't think anyone is arguing that this type-of-thing is what's going on.
your “caveat” concedes much of point. the people who were making $12 an hour who are now making $15 have seen real wags growth.
I used to pay my assistant $21. Now I pay $30. That’s real wage growth. It’s put a pinch in my profits, but I support a world where paralegals get a bigger slice of the pie and attorneys get a smaller one
Yea, I know this is bad form, but I am seeing such a mass of individual anecdotal evidence that says "wage growth for the lowest-paid work is much higher than 5%" that I simply cannot regard this data as credible.
So... that can't completely be true or we wouldn't have this post asking for them to come in and "suppress" wages. Or the mechanism is more complicated.
Basic mechanism: We don't want to / can't afford to pay native-born
meatpackers/strawberry pickers more money because that would push strawberry/meat prices higher. But we can get immigrants to do the job for less money. That would seem to be pushing down wages.
Except I guess:
1) If the job simply _isn't_ worth it for more money, then the higher wage doesn't even exist as a possibility, so having someone come in and do it for less isn't really depressing wages, because the higher-wage job doesn't exist.
2) Having immigrants come in and do those jobs might depress wages somewhat _in that sector_ but it opens up additional jobs for the native-born at higher wages (more restaurants selling burgers & fruit)?
(Also, I thought there was still some dispute on the wages thing - where _most_ economists thought it didn't, but Borjas etc thought it did and it wasn't 100% clear-cut either way)
Its remarkable how many people are trying to make xenophobia sound progressive here. I think regardless of what matt or anyone says, people will just have a hard time trusting strangers, and people who like immigration have to cope with that.
if you define xenophobia as wanting to keep foreigners out then immigration restriction is xenophobic. that begs the question of whether this particular xenophic policy is bad.
being xenophobic is only a demerit to the extent it is an irrational or prejudiced fear of foreigners. if i simply want to exclude foreigners because i prefer greater equality and solidarity within my country, certainly there is no shame in that.
Well, *this* takes bad faith arguments and “playing the person” to a new level.
My wife is an immigrant. I couldn’t give less of a flying *fuck* whether immigration is a progressive value or not, and I’ve never once considered myself a progressive.
But I certainly take offense at being called a xenophobe or bigot because I believe the preponderance of evidence says mass low-skilled immigration constrains wage growth for working class citizens.
As I thought I made clear above, I do not give a damn about the open borders crowd. I don't care about their conception of morality, don't care about their opinions, don't care about their screeching and whining and sobbing, don't care about their protests and marches.
I stand with the vast majority of Americans (and people worldwide) in maintaining that nation-states, borders, sovereignty, citizenship, and the responsibilities of a government to its people have meaning, and the tiny minority who believe otherwise can fuck off.
All they accomplish is to poison "the left" with pie-in-the-sky bullshit and self-interested virtue signaling at the expense of solidarity, healthy patriotism, and the mutual obligations of citizenship.
The only concession I will grant them is that the US should not enforce immigration law by cosplaying Gestapo at and near the border. It is gratuitously cruel, immoral, and ineffective.
It should instead implement and enforce an e-verify system for all employers with punitive penalties. Then use the disruption to illustrate the need for a pathway to citizenship for long-time residents, and set the amount and balance of legal immigration that best serves American interests going forward.
1) link please
2) if that’s true, then much of inflation had nothing to do with labor. if labor is 80% of the value of a product and it gets 5% more expensive, that would explain a 4% (.8*.05) increase in the price. whenever prices increase faster than labor costs, there are also other factors driving the increase
Inflation is a general rise in price levels. Of course labor represents only a portion of it.
which is why prices don’t rise faster than wages
Prices are currently rising faster than wages.
I'm not opposed to increasing legal immigration, as long as it's paired with reforms that decrease illegal immigration.
We should have control over our borders, and be able to adjust the number and skill set of people coming here.
In addition, levels of immigration should be slow enough to allow time for assimilation.
It seems like there's a strong consensus that allowing more immigration is good but very little legislative appetite for it... obviously the right has gone fully anti-immigration and the pro-immigration corporate types are now marginalized in the party. Meanwhile on the left there's hardly any focus on increasing legal immigration... A sad state of affairs.
Democrats are kind of in a bind here -- it feels like whenever whenever there are big surges in asylum seekers, it becomes really hard to push through other kinds of immigration.
(It'd help if the Chamber of Commerce or whatever would bother to push Republicans more to support increases in the number of visas we give out.)
how will we build enough houses for everyone
Turn San Francisco into Kowloon Walled City 2.0
Well, for the time being, a bunch of those immigrants are probably going to live with multiple families to a house.