In the industries that employ the most illegals, none have more than 15% illegals. Only two have over 10%. The majority are well under 10%.
The price will rise to meet what the market will bear, and federal & state dollars are being dumped into a housing market that used to be more or less organic.
Joe Shmoe with a meager wage can not compete with a section 8 landlord that owns any number of units and is willing to buy more because he knows the federal taps are opened for illegal immigrants.
There is nothing organic or free market about that.
3 Likes
He seems intelligent enough but keeps making these absurd arguments. As if people can’t spot the difference between state dependents here to collect without assimilating and the Jamaican immigrants we have working in our hospitals or running a fantastic business.
I don’t begrudge anyone who takes our government up on the offer of free stuff and no illegal immigration penalties. I blame the people who offer it.
3 Likes
If I’m not mistaken it’s 17% and 13% for agriculture and construction respectively. If you drill down to farming you get a quarter of illegals and more than half among field workers with much higher numbers in CA, NV and TX. Since the majority of illegals are employed, someone is hiring them for jobs that citizens are unwilling to do at current market rates.
1 Like
Even if those numbers are correct, it means that people here legally do indeed do those jobs.
That’s something to think about. It’s not necessarily that people here legally won’t do those jobs as much as they won’t get hired to do those jobs. Americans do dangerous and shitty jobs. They work in sewers, as lumberjacks, on oil rigs, on the pipeline in Alaska, on fishing boats, and so on.
Any industry that hires relatively large numbers of illegals will be able to adjust and carry on by hiring people who are here legally.
You think there might be a bit of a wage difference between those gigs and picking strawberries in Salinas? Or, more realistically, a vast wage difference? Like, magnitudes of order different?
1 Like
Yes, but not for compensation being paid to illegals or H-2A holders for that matter. It’s a question of wages. For labor intensive, back breaking jobs you simply have to pay citizens much more.
Yeah, a 180 billion industry like agriculture will happily see a large fraction of their opex double or triple.
And BTW, there’s a quote from this apparently smart guy that confirms deporting illegals is logistically unfeasible.
On immigration, Republicans are similarly tone deaf. I became a conservative in large part because I felt that the Right was far more honest about the real state of the world. Yet a significant part of Republican immigration policy centers on the possibility of deporting 12 million people (or “self deporting” them). Think about it: we conservatives (rightly) mistrust the government to efficiently administer business loans and regulate our food supply, yet we allegedly believe that it can deport millions of unregistered aliens. The notion fails to pass the laugh test. The same can be said for too much of the party’s platform.
We’ll just issue them an international airline ticket to anywhere on the globe. Geneva, Paris, Berlin, Liga, there are tons of beautiful places that would love to have them.
You made my point.
That’s my point. Pro illegal infestation likes to say Americans won’t do those jobs implying Americans think they are too good to do them. It ignores the truth that it is the employers who created the perceived unwillingness of Americans to do those jobs.
They can still hire foreigners but there needs to be a process to be sure they are coming to work jobs that are waiting for them. I mean, we have that process already. Employers are not so desperate for workers we need millions of illegals flooding the border. Will employers make less money by hiring people who are here legally? Possibly. But they’ll just have to adjust to the reality that comes with living in a nation of laws. How many in agriculture are getting subsidies? It’s a form of double dipping. And things have a way of evening out sometimes if we consider that illegals are a net drain on the economy. The government, we tax payers, subsidize cheap labor.
The problem with this position is that it wasn’t logistically unfeasible for them to get here. We’re supposed to believe a poor woman with a low IQ, no education and who can’t speak English, somehow was able to walk hundreds of miles, cross a border or two unhindered, end up in a major American city, get a free hotel room and a debit card as being within the realm of possibility (because it happens) but we can’t believe that a modern nation with limitless resources somehow can’t figure out a way to get said woman out of the country?
So, just 3x-4x the pay, build new quality housing and Americans might start filling those jobs. Tghat will probably cause some significant downstream impacts (high food/labor costs nationally, skyrocketing prices locally from high wages, sudden sociocultural as shifts, etc).
Un/fortunately a good chunk of american life is built on uber cheap labor domestically and internationally. Upsetting that, would be a seismic change to american society.
If you can’t have an economy based on obeying the law, then that’s a separate problem which needs to be addressed. And looking at how food prices have gone up, even with illegals working and with technological improvements regarding production, I question how illegals are keeping prices low.
I know from having a farm behind me (like directly adjacent) and working with a bunch of guys from south of the border that there absolutely are labor agencies that supply staff to a wide variety of industries.
But they also expect you to conduct yourself like a normal civilized citizen.
Thats not who we’re getting pouring across the border.
2 Likes
It’s like they have a filtration system at a point where it’s irrelevant. They let everyone in and some will go work and others will be a problem. But it’s too late to keep the problem ones out.
The thing is, we have policies in place right now in many jurisdictions that say we won’t deport them and that we won’t even detain them when we find them. It’s not about implementing an active mass deportation. We just need to start enforcing the law when it comes up.
From what I’ve heard, ICE deportation centers are already bursting at the seams. It sounds logistically difficult/expensive to process folks, coordinate and gain approval from another country, and then physically deport them.
The deportation process will need to become much more efficient. But if theres one thing we can all agree on, it’s that govt isn’t efficient.
The system is overwhelmed. But making a govt department bigger isn’t the Republican MO. Tough decisions.
Of course it sounds like that.
