Yup. All those unemployed miners from Ohio are going to move to California and become maids, pool cleaners, burger-flippers and agricultural workers.
If the people in CA are not willing to pay their maids fair market wages, then maybe they can do their own fucking dishes.
Another is that the parts of the country with growing economies and lots of great jobs are generally cities with incredibly high rents. It's not easy to move halfway across the country to take an entry-level job and somehow live off that if you need to pay Bay Area / NY Area / DC Area / etc rents, and doubly so if you have a family.
This is one reason I think it's so critical to build a serious urbanist movement in US. The status quo of restrictive zoning, low building, and sky-high rents keeps hundreds of thousands of people from being able to access the places that would enable them to build better lives. If we allowed our cities to grow and invested in the transit infrastructure to keep them livable at even moderately higher densities, it could unleash a tremendous amount of prosperity.
We heavily subsidize home ownership, which creates huge disincentives for mobility. In reality we should probably tax it and subsidize renters.
We pay people to sit around in their old location rather than moving. Our "disability insurance" program is actually a giant secret welfare program for people who refuse to leave economically depressed areas. http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
We drastically restrict housing supply in economically productive areas.
Well, most of Middle America has high home-ownership rates, underwater mortgages, no public transit, gutted public education, and nearly zero public health-care. So yes, a whole lot is stopping people moving: they're broke, stuck with a mortgage, and would have to go further into debt to move, without a job offer.
The fact is that many migrants are willing to risk destitution or even death to relocate, and they will work their socks off at menial jobs for a better life (for their children in particular).
How many unemployed American workers are doing the same?
Start prosecuting employers of illegal immigrants, and you'll see the wage floor rise.
Employers are not entitled to cheap labor. Advocating for such an environment is why the US has a pseudo-populist president now.
As far as I can see, it would just create jobs that Americans won't or can't do.
And while you can raise the wage-floor, that increases costs, which may well raise prices....
I see this stated often, largely by people who have never worked these types of jobs, and for the record I'm not saying that this is the case with you, but it really doesn't match my own experiences.
I've worked as a janitor in a super market, a landscaper, a manual laborer in construction, a laborer in the Central Valley on a farm, as well as a dishwasher, all in CA, and while my coworkers were mostly Hispanic, and some were undocumented, many were white, black or Asian and born in the US. These were all minimum wage or below jobs so I'm not sure were this idea is coming from. When people are poor and desperate, they will usually take any work they can get regardless of immigration status or citizenship.
It remains the case that lots of Americans do not have jobs, while lots of immigrants do have jobs.
I'm sure there are many complex reasons for this, but it's still not obvious to me that unemployed Americans would do the jobs that are currently done by people who are so "poor and desperate, they will usually take any work they can get regardless of immigration status or citizenship".
Meanwhile, unemployment fell from 9.2% to 8.7% due almost entirely to the automotive industry (which doesn't really hire illegal immigrants) with no change in construction, agriculture, etc. Afaik the agricultural industry in Alabama still hasn't recovered from the shock, even though the majority of those who left returned by 2015.
Unfortunately because of other American policy related to agriculture this is difficult for some companies to do.
Basically what the Alabama law proved is that companies aren't willing to provide sufficient quality working conditions and pay to entice American workers. The specific job may be a factor in that, but that isn't something this event proves anything about.
Exactly. If the cost to produce something exceeds its profit, then either the prices must rise or the business closes.
Why do you think California is so fiercely protective of illegals? Because one of their major industries is agriculture. They have a competitive advantage against states like Alabama because of their unwillingness to enforce the law. Essentially California is stealing from Alabama as they are taking advantage of below-market labor to harm competitors. A lot of the $15 minimum wage advocates are in California -- yet nary a peep about minimum wage violations by the agricultural industry there. If there were actually an enforced $15 minimum wage, Alabama would be competitive agin because they'd be on equal footing with labor costs (and more competitive because of lower regulatory costs and taxes.) Illegals working California fields aren't making anywhere near $15 per hour.
Hiring illegal aliens is quite simply a means to avoid minimum wage.