Friar Bijou wrote:
gbaji wrote:
I will point out, however, that the whole "find ways for folks to get low skill jobs here without sneaking across the border" is a GOP position.
And by "low skilled" you mean "low paying". Yes, I agree the GOP types are totaly on board with underpaying every worker on the planet.
I get that this is the element that creates problems for the left (and some on the right, to be fair). But, as easy as it is to rhetoric this into something "evil", the simple fact is that "low paying" is
necessary for this to work. That's frankly the primary problem with liberal solutions, they want to open the doors to low skill immigrants, but then insist on paying them their version of a "working wage" (or at least using them as yet more ammunition to fight for such silliness). Again, more rhetoric. Wages are relative. If you raise the wages for low and non-skilled workers, all other wages will go up, inflation will set in, and you'll eliminate the gains you thought (pretended really, since no one actually believes that this would work any other way) you'd get.
Unpopular as this may seem at first glance, in order to get all of those who are currently choosing to cross the southern border illegally to do so legally, you must include the ability for employers to pay them less than the current minimum wage. That doesn't mean that all *must* be paid less than minimum (just as not all undocumented aliens are working under the table for $50/day right now). But this sort of pay scale must be allowed. Why you say? Because right now, for many undocumented aliens (the poorest and with the least resources, and therefore the most likely to be stuck in the kinds of debt situations I spoke of earlier), the only way their labor can compete against existing labor sources in the US is if they can offer their labor for less than that which must be paid to a "legal" worker.
The demand for their labor is due to this fact. Fair or not, that is the case right now. Any solution which does not duplicate this (but in a legal documented manner) will fail because if the consequence of documentation is an inability to work under the table for less than what others must be paid (ie: giving them a competitive advantage in the labor market), they wont chose to do this. And, if our guest worker visa has some sort of "must have verifiable work" requirement (which it also must), then we're back to folks entering and then having to leave, only to likely enter illegally next time so they can actually get work. Sounds silly, especially to those who don't live near the border, but that is the actual reality of things. I think sometimes people lose sight of the fact that the people I'm talking about are currently working for wages in their countries of origin that we'd consider insanely low. Being able to earn say $5/hour is a massive economic benefit to them. More importantly, it gets their foot in the door, allowing for future mobility and higher pay later, which they currently can do, but it's much much harder.
So yeah, we have to be "evil" about this. If you've defined evil as "letting people in gross poverty earn 70% of our minimum wage here in the US". I'll take that evil every day. And if along the way, it solves our border problem, it's well worth it. And heaven forbid that this actually benefits the people we're being "evil" to, by massively improving their life condition. It's almost like this "evil" benefits pretty much everyone. The *only* drawback is that this could have an impact on low skill entry level labor among US citizens. But if you limited this to a smallish number of fields where existing undocumented aliens are currently working anyway (but in which few entry level US folks are), you can minimize this effect. So no fry-o-later jobs being lost, cutting into teenagers mall money, but we can certainly allow this for low skill construction, repair, agriculture, and landscaping type jobs.
Obviously, such a solution does require refinement. But yeah, you do have to get past the hangup over "OMG! We're going to pay them less than we pay other people!!!". Yes. We are. Just as we are right now. Only now we're doing it legally, so they don't have to go into hock with a cartel for the privilege of working those low wages and don't have to live in constant fear of ICE leading them to essentially live hidden lives away from the rest of the society around them. I just don't think most people who live far away from the border realize what an impact this has. It's just like there are two societies here. One is hidden, but if you look, you can see it. And it's not pretty. You wonder, "Where do all those guys hanging around waiting for work go at night? What do they do to socialize? What about their families?". They just kinda disappear. It's pretty unlikely that they're all just piling into their cars and driving home. I think most people would be shocked how many camps there are, hidden just out of sight. No one looks at them, but they are there. It's reminiscent of past cultures with their "unclean" class. Scary. And not a good status quo. For the lucky, it's crowded apartments rented with false IDs (or by someone they know who has legal credentials), hoping that no one notices them. But in all cases, we're talking about a class that is habitually victimized because they have nearly zero recourse. And those who victimize them (often other illegals) know this. It's like freaking Lord of the Flies. Ok. Not quite that bad, but not so good either.
This is the part that I get bothered by. It's the part that the left (and to be fair, many on the right as well), just ignores. For the right, it's about law enforcement. But for the left? I don't know. I honestly suspect that there's some actual desire by some to perpetuate this state, just so they can have more victims for us to feel sorry about. But they never seem to want to actually fix it. While the right is far from perfect on this issue, they at least propose ideas (even unpopular ones) that can solve the problem. The left? Every idea I've heard from the left seems almost designed (whether through intention or ignorance) to make the problems worse. I actually watched a discussion about illegal immigration a few years back and one of the strongest arguments from the liberals at the table (which I've heard repeated many times) is that if we just raised the working wage to say $18/hour, this would make low paying jobs more attractive to US/legal workers, and thus force the illegal out of the market. A stunning example of absolute economic idiocy, but there you have it. That was the "solution" to the problem. Not to solve it, but to pivot to another pet social position that has nothing at all to do with immigration, and then pretend it'll help with our immigration problems. So basically just using the issue to push another agenda. Wow! Fantastic job there liberals.
Oh. And btw, all raising the minimum wage would do is create *more* demand for illegal labor wiling and able to work for less, and more incentive for illegal labor to fill that demand. It would massively increase the problem of low skill undocumented labor, not decrease it. But let's not mix common economic sense into the issue when there's an agenda to be pushed!
Edited, Sep 15th 2015 2:46pm by gbaji