Couple threads going, let's move discussions here. Let's try to avoid claiming that the main driver of wanting citizenship to be documented properly is rooted xenophobia or racism since that's not a constructive line of conversation.
I'm going to repost my plan for immigration reform as well, since I welcome comments on it.
1. The only reason there are jobs that "americans won't do" is because they pay too little. Thus, increasing the supply of labor through illegals serves to keep wages depressed, in essence creating a continuous underclass of non citizen which I personally view as immoral, since it is a small step above slave labor.2. If you work in America, in a just system, every worker should be entitled to the same protections that other workers get. A level playing field for employment is essential in a (somewhat) free market.
That all being said, here is the plan:
1. Set up a working employee identification system, perhaps run by the social security administration. Require all employers to check work eligibility status. If employers are found who are not doing this, fine the employer heavily. Multiple occurrences should include jail time for the management responsible.
2. Set up an efficient guest worker program with Latin America and Canada. Potential workers should show up, apply for work eligibility, and after a background/education check should be put into the eligible labor pool. The application process should be designed to take no more than a few weeks.
3. The department of labor should provide statistics by geographic area on wages for unskilled labor. Any business seeking to hire these potential workers should have to pay a rate of 25% higher than the average unskilled labor wage. All businesses are required to provide high deductible health insurance and injury/disability insurance for the temporary workers they hire. (This is intended to encourage wages to move up to a level where citizens will actually consider them).
4. Employers will specify the time frame for the temporary worker, the temporary work visa will be good for the worker and their family for that time period. If they are terminated, they may remain in the country for a period of 6 months, if they don't find work in that time, they have to go home. If a temporary worker has gainful employment for more than a 3 year period, they may apply for fast-tracked citizenship for their immediate family. Out of work but present temporary workers go to the front of the hiring queue to prevent unnecessary shuffle.
5. If at any time a temporary worker commits a crime that is more than a misdemeanor, their status is to be immediately terminated and they must leave the country.
Additionally, while there is some debate about how many, we have documented evidence that non-citizens are voting in elections, though since we don't have proper controls it's hard to determine how much so that may bring up the voter id and national id discussions that are often linked to this topic.
One of the problems with your plan, bandit, is that it's not practical. As a set of policy goal for the far future, it's laudable given a few modifications, but as a solution to the current problem, it kind of sucks.
Deporting every illegal in the US would affect the labor market about the same as what happened in Georgia, and setting up a worker registration program to keep track of every worker replacing every illegal one to one would require a massive bureaucracy - and even then it would work with a backlog millions-strong in the first few years.
Apart from that, such a program would face the exact same hostility illegals already face now, only it would have to also wither the storm of Congress and popular opinion. You may not be a racist, but there are many in the US who are, and they'll move hell and high water to make sure that your worker program is just as f*cked up as the current immigration procedures already are.
My plan doesn't call for the deportation of every illegal, only the ones who haven't worked in years and criminals. The others can go into the guest worker program, though I think as punishment they shouldn't be eligible for citizenship like those who start the program the right way.
If they're not documented, how can you tell whether they've worked or not?
Well, honestly, I think that you should 'show papers' in any area of life where you need to be legitimized - be it employment, drivers license, voting, social security, government services, etc. I'm pretty sure that if those areas are policed correctly than the whole issue of being stopped somewhere and picked up for being in the country illegally would be unnecessary. So I would definitely agree with stiff fines for people who do not do due diligence in their employment. This would definitely have the flip side effect of making businesses more accountable for their employees, and employees would have a lot more options if they weren't afraid of actually going to the authorities about issues.
It's like a catch 22 - you're illegal so you can't complain, so you agree to whatever your boss wants, which in turn allows him to pay you less simply for the 'benefit' of being employed illegally. No matter what, if you don't address the people who allow illegals to exist and work, nothing else will work.
However, I can't say I agree with your 'solution' to the minimal wage. Decreeing by government mandate what wages need to be paid undermines the whole point of making people work legitamately. Why should an American worker get paid 25% less just because he's an American citizen?? Part of the reason why these people come across the border to work is so they can send the valuable american dollar back over the border back to their families, where it's worth much more and the cost of living is much less. Illegals don't do these jobs because they're crap and under paid, they do them because they're better than any other option they have in their home country.
Lastly, it's important not to forget that there is already a working immigration policy in place that allows temporary workers entry to the country, with the proper checks etc etc. Just because some people ignore the legal route, doesn't mean that there aren't tens of thousands of people immigrating legally already.
Personally, speaking from an Australian perspective here, where people get shipped ('boat people') from 3rd world countries to here, I figure that if you get caught living in the country illegally you should just be enlisted in a civilian engineer corps for 3 years. Your labour builds infrastructure, you get taken care of for 3 years (food & lodging) and after that you have the option of becoming a landed immigrant and find your own way.
so a 40% increase in farm labor wages ($9.06 /hr in 2007 vs $16.75/hr for non farm workers) would result in your average family spending an extra $8 a year for produce.
Sure, but actually at the farm, the labor is a huge percentage of the cost of food production. So farms that pay high wages will not be able to sell their food as cheaply as those that pay low wages, assuming production is otherwise comparable. So the middlemen who actually buy the food from the farms will buy it from the cheapest sources, which will include overseas labor.
Ultimately, this means food production will move to states that don't enforce immigration laws as strictly, and eventually out of the country completely, if necessary.
Or, U.S. farms will roboticize, completely removing all need for manual picking.
Either way, it ultimately comes down to the fact that we can't both have relatively open trade and force low-skill jobs to be highly paid. We can't have both. Strict immigration laws won't drive up wages, they'll just destroy farming.
The world is full of people who will pick food for very low wages. If we don't hire them, someone else will. We can only ultimately drive up wages for food-pickers if we drive up labor prices worldwide.
Good, increases in productivity and lower costs that robots bring should have a net decrease on the price of food.
Sure, but you're not getting high-paid, low-skill agricultural jobs. I believe you've made the argument that stopping illegal immigration will raise wages, but what it will actually do is move the low-skill jobs away. You can't make jobs be paid more than they're actually worth for very long until the invisible hand corrects you.... try to do things that are too stupid/draconian, and it will turn into the invisible pimp hand, slapping you around until you stop.
Similar arguments were made in the 1960s, didn't happen then, I have no evidence to believe that it would happen now
What, the $220 billion trade deficit isn't enough for you? We were running a surplus in the 1960s, a very large one. Now we're net consumers of the world's goods, to an extraordinary degree, and the trade deficit is probably the easiest way to see just how large a problem it's become. The jobs moved overseas because they were priced too high for the skill levels on offer in the U.S.
The world is a very, very different place than it was fifty years ago.
Good. As we have seen with offshoring to India, Korea, China, Vietnam, etc that a growing middle class in those countries sparks demand for luxury goods and knowledge services that the Western world is well equipped to provide.
Sure, but part of globalization is the equalization of living standards. Little bandaid fixes like making it hard to import cheap labor isn't going to do jack sh*t to address that fundamental issue.
but it is not ok to take advantage of someone by paying low wages, low benefits, and not following labor/safety regulations just because they'd be worse off in Mexico.
Then how about we just make it legal to immigrate freely? Then it would be very easy to regulate the resulting jobs.
Most Americans aren't going to work in a field for $9.06/hr. I bet a good chunk would do it for $15 or $20 though. If as the source I cited is correct that the average unskilled labor rate (non-farm) is $16.75/hr, then it should cost you at least $16.75/hr to import Mexican labor, I think a small surcharge to make it worthwhile recruiting Americans makes sense.
You can't make jobs pay more than they actually generate in value. If you try, the jobs will just disappear. That's what they've been doing for the last twenty years or so, and your prescription will make that problem worse, not better.
Good, increases in productivity and lower costs that robots bring should have a net decrease on the price of food.Sure, but you're not getting high-paid, low-skill agricultural jobs. I believe you've made the argument that stopping illegal immigration will raise wages, but what it will actually do is move the low-skill jobs away. You can't make jobs be paid more than they're actually worth for very long until the invisible hand corrects you.... try to do things that are too stupid/draconian, and it will turn into the invisible pimp hand, slapping you around until you stop.
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You can't make jobs pay more than they actually generate in value. If you try, the jobs will just disappear. That's what they've been doing for the last twenty years or so, and your prescription will make that problem worse, not better.
That assumes that illegal immigrants are currently being paid the full value of their work already. No employee (or at least, the employees taken as a whole) is paid their full value: the business owner would then be running a charity.
Workers are paid whatever percentage of the profits (and of course, that means an owner's projected profits) they can negotiate out of the owner. Just because you make an owner raise wages doesn't mean those jobs will necessarily move. They'll only move if it makes economic sense to move. It only makes economic sense to move if some other place offers bigger profits, not just because their existing profits have been reduced.
My plan doesn't call for the deportation of every illegal, only the ones who haven't worked in years and criminals. The others can go into the guest worker program, though I think as punishment they shouldn't be eligible for citizenship like those who start the program the right way.
That just argues impossibly ideal settings and eye-for-an-eye policy, or misplaced "punishment-as-deterrent" policy.
What purpose does it serve to punish people for not taking options they didn't have before? It won't deter future illegals - once you institute the guest worker program, the situation becomes completely different. In fact, punishing those who came before just because they came before any options were on the table sends the message that you want to arbitrarily persecute people, just because you've justified it to yourself. That's a bad message to send, if you want to win hearts and minds, and it undermines the legitimacy of your guest worker policy. If you get punished arbitrarily anyway, what's the point of following the rules?
Also, it's impractical to determine who's worked and who's a criminal, outside of normal measures. In fact, "criminals" probably shouldn't even be on the table, because the government supposedly already hunts those guys down. Any person at all who's a criminal (apart from violating immigration laws) is already on the "wanted" list, and when they're caught and processed, they get already get deported. There's no need to beef up that part of the system, except as a general beefing up of law and order efforts.
It goes without saying that if your primary purpose is to assassinate the President, you don't hold up a convenience store for a gum en route to your goal. That's just stupid. Likewise, illegals who cross the border for work generally would be more law-abiding than normal since any infraction, no matter how small, could end with their deportation. They probably go considerably out of their way just to avoid things like speeding tickets and jaywalking offenses.
This doesn't address the difficulty of setting up a guest worker program documenting and tracking the millions of illegals already in the country. Making them face punishment to go legal just puts more barriers to documentation and processing, for the sake of a punishment policy that undermines your overall goal. The entire point of this punishment seems to be to "get even," even at the cost of the stated goal.
From a management standpoint, it seems to be best to offer incentives for illegals to go legal. This would not encourage people to go in illegally, so long as there's still more benefits to starting up legally in the first place. Ideally, you want the worst state to be illegal, overall, the second best to go legal, and the best to start off legal. Punishing people for going legal undermines the relationship between the state of having gone legal, and staying illegal.
Finally, you haven't addressed the difficulty of getting your guest worker plan to work better than how the current immigration stuff already does. Those laws are like that for many reasons, and some of those reasons is because many Americans simply don't like foreigners, and particularly foreigners who aren't white. How are you going to sidestep racist interest groups who want to make life hard for people with the wrong color skin?
Most Americans aren't going to work in a field for $9.06/hr.
I think you might be surprised at the number of unemployed Americans that would disagree. However, you're now bumping up against the whole concept of unemployment benefits, the social security net that locks people out of those low paying jobs. If you can get money from the government that A) pays you more for not working and B) disappears if you actually get employed, even if you make less than before, then what's the point of working at $9/h? Illegal immigrants don't have a safety net, so their minimum acceptable wage is a lot less.
Secondly, farm wages are probably a terrible dollar rate to use, considering how closely monitored food supplies are. I'm fairly sure that there's a lengthy chain between you the consumer and the farmer who grows the stuff, and there are a TON of regulations inbetween. Of the few farmers I know (mostly small, family size farms) work crazy hours and dance on the edge of going out of business every year, weather and crop permitting. I'm quite sure that mandating some sort of minimum farm wage would put them out of business entirely.
LarryC raises a good point though - no matter what you want to do policy-wise.. what do you do with all the people currently illegal & in the country? Force them out? Round them up & put them to work? Blanket amnesty?
Per the link I sourced above, the market rate for unskilled labor is $16.75/hr. The rate for agricultural labor is a mere $9.06/hr. What do you suppose is the contributing factor in that gap?
Probably, that's about what agricultural jobs are worth. You can get berry pickers for a few dollars a DAY in China. Nine dollars an hour in the US is really pretty good, considering that it takes only some practice, and no other training whatsoever.
This year, you see produce rotting in the field. Next year, if things don't change, some or all of those farms simply won't plant.
Very few people will stop buying produce because their bill goes up $8 a year.
You're right, they wouldn't. But the people who buy food from farms will stop buying the expensive produce. They'll buy the cheap stuff first from other states, and then from Mexico and China and Brazil instead. So US farms will stop planting, and probably turn into subdivisions instead.
By stopping illegal immigration, and forcing farmers to pay higher wages, all you're doing is destroying jobs.
Make immigration easy and legal, and then you'd see the rate for farms end up at the right level, whatever the right level is, because the immigrants will be able to complain about poor conditions and more easily job-shop. If the workers can't be abused the way they can be now, that should bring wages right up to whatever level is actually possible for farmers to pay and still make a reasonable profit.
If you completely remove immigrant labor, farms will not be able to get the bodies at all at a price they can actually afford, and anywhere from some to most of the farming in this country will go away. Americans DO NOT WANT these jobs. Read the links in the post I linked earlier -- the Georgia farmers keep very few American workers beyond a half-day or so.
bandit0013:
This is what you're trying to do:
"Hey illegals! Why don't you all come forward so we can levy punishments on you?"
Yeah, that's probably not going to be heeded by pretty much anyone. You'd have to institute pretty substantial rewards to get anyone to submit to a system where the first thing you do is tell them they're unwanted and are going to be targets for punitive measures. The chance for this working on a voluntary basis, as-is is probably going to be very, very low, but I'm open to discussing any rewards you might be thinking of countering the severely bad message you're sending - enough to get people to sign up for this.
"Alright, we gave you a chance. Now we're going to round you all up and deport you en masse."
See: Georgia. This stance is incompatible with saying that you're not going to deport people en masse. If you institute a registration system that's pretty much all negative, and then deport anyone who doesn't comply, then what you're doing is essentially mass deportation.
Putting massive pressure on employers not to employ illegals just works along the same lines, only on the employer side.
Your future vision is laudable, as I said, but the way you're proposing to get there isn't tenable in a number of very obvious ways. I'm commenting on your input here from a realpolitik perspective - trying to find something that works. Punishing current illegals may be morally satisfying to people who've migrated to the US legally, but I'm highly skeptical about its real-world efficacy. Coming as it is from a perspective hostile to illegals, it's probably likely to be as effective as the Georgian measures - highly effective one way, but probably devastatingly catastrophic in other ways.
bandit0013:
"Should?" Why should they? Look at the situation impassively. Every decision a human makes is an economic one, and this is particularly an effective way to predict how people will react to policy issues where religion and ideology does not play a major role. Why would an illegal jump at the chance to go legal, when you're not offering any sort of benefit? "You get to stay" is not a benefit. They're already in, and provided that they stay incognito, they're likely to remain. You're not offering a reward. You're threatening a punishment. Those are different things.
What I see is that you're thinking "Hey, if YOU guys are really honest, you'd sign up!" That's a morality position from a POV hostile to illegals. It's not something that I think will likely appeal to them whatsoever. They don't care what you think. They just want to work. Threatening mass deportation is, well, pretty much exactly what Georgia did. Why register for immediate punishment, and various unknown further punishments once registered, when you can just move to another state to keep working? Status quo, while dangerous, is more attractive than being under the control of a power group that you think hates your guts.
You have to see things from their point of view in order to institute measures that they will find attractive - that's the carrot. Likewise, you have to see things from their point of view to really hit them where they hurt - that's the stick. Empathy and feedback is key to developing policies that will work for your stakeholders.
LarryC:
So getting their base wage raised from $9.06/hr to $16.75/hr, becoming eligible for unemployment, medicare, social security, etc aren't economic incentives enough for the hard working honest types to come forward?
It sounds like you're saying "No Bandit, you just don't get it, they WANT to be exploited"
I was actually about to pretty much post this.
The upshot to Bandit's plan is that it benefits illegals by improving their work compensation, and it benefits citizens by building up wages on "undesireable" jobs. There are some good criticisms of the plan brought up in this thread so far, but "all you want to do is punish illegal immigrants" is definitely not one of them.
Farscry:
I specifically pointed out that the punishment levied on illegals (not being able to be citizens) was the only part of that plan that seemed unnecessarily punitive. It's not like they have had such a choice before. Even today, the only recourse most people have to work in the US is to enter illegally.
bandit0013:
There's no guarantee that they would be hired under a wage of $16.75/hr, or if that floor wage is workable for the agriculture industry. If there were a reasonable certainty of that, then sure. You also didn't stipulate that your guest worker program would include unemployment, medicare, SS and other benefits. Typically, someone under H1B visa who couldn't find work is forced to exit the country. Having that over the head of a father while his children were US citizens would be a significant enough downside, I think, for him not to consider it, even if the wage increase were tenable.
As I said, you have to put yourself in the position of illegals honestly if you're to formulate plans that will work for them. It would probably be best if any lawmaker interested in tackling this problem undertake living the entirety of the life of an illegal and going underground with them, to get a real view of the ins and outs from an insider perspective.
Bandit is right that we could significantly raise farming wages with little effect on consumer pricing of food. (There are other sources for similar conclusions - this seems to be a little contested conclusion of economists.) My question is this - what's stopping this from happening in the market today? If we have to do this with regulation or government intervention, doesn't that mess with the level playing field for all workers?
bandit0013:
Under the H1B program, you do not have unemployment benefits, even though you pay for those things while employed. I'm not aware if you have full medicare benefits, though you pay for those, too. Not only are you ineligible for unemployment benefits under H1B, you are also bound to your employer. If your employer is no longer sponsoring you, you're deported post haste. The common solution is to go illegal while you look for another employer who will sponsor you.
Employers also have significant disincentive for hiring foreign workers under the H1B program. It is illegal to do so, but they typically load those additional costs onto the employees. Too, the dependency of employees on the employer for their US presence means that they are in a greatly reduced bargaining position. H1Bs are typically underpaid compared to similar US workers, in addition to often having to pay off employer disincentives. It is not without reason that it was often viewed as an indentured servant program prior to the year 2000 changes, and it's not that much better off since.
And the program has quotas, too, generally so far below demand and supply that there's a years-long backlog and limited market correction in the local demand.
The only reason H1B "works" is because most people who go into it are highly skilled, highly industrious, and highly motivated workers who don't have a lot of luxury expectations, so they're willing to take pay cuts against colleagues as long as it doesn't eat into basic human needs.
Unskilled workers would not have this leeway. They're already kind of at the limit of human cost of living in the US. The threat of deporting the entire family to a country they haven't lived in for 20 years (and have no resources to survive in) is so harsh that it would render any kind of bargaining position moot.
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