The distinction often is more akin to "promising" and "not promising". Universities, employers, creditors, those looking for a spouse, etc. Everyone does it to some degree. Why can't a country?
Ask Australia? But at a very basic level:
* Criminal background -> sorry
* No high school-equivalent education -> sorry
* Crippling, expensive disease -> sorry
Those are just three basic things that let you know straight away that this person has little chance to do anything but consume resources.
There's no way a standard policy is going to somehow separate the Stephen Hawkings from the general population before they have actually accomplished anything of note.
So your policy can either be cautious, or it can be over liberal.
As a fellow dropout, I think you just took this chance to show-off (like many dropouts/unconventionally successful do).
You think a person from Mexico is more useless than a person from Canada?
It's got nothing to do with race or nationality, just a statement about the average Mexican vs the average Canadian. Don't throw logic out the window in service to liberal ideals.
Why would we even want someone who's "culturally" a better fit? I'd love it if the people around me were more diverse, it makes life richer and more interesting.
It seems like he fit in just fine, thanks to his command of English (his service business would have gotten nowhere if he didn't speak English), and an invention called "air conditioning" let him deal with the 100 degree heat, just like every other person in that metro area.
Honestly, your comment about moose hunting is downright offensive.
It's supposed to be: the whole idea of allowing only people who are a good "cultural fit" is offensive. That's the point I was refuting. Determining "cultural fit" requires absurd stereotypes.
The idea that Mexicans can't find a place in our country is as absurd as the idea that Canadians can't.
But it's a dumb argument to go into because I probably won't convince you about cultural similarity and vice versa.
On the other hand, language can be quantitatively measured and gives an opportunity to ambitious people around the world.
This is just dumb. US cuisine borrows more heavily from China than from Australia too, but no one is going to claim that US culture is very similar to Chinese culture. I live in a little town and there's 3 Chinese restaurants here, and only 1 Mexican.
>We have more Spanish speakers than Spain
We probably have more Chinese speakers than Hong Kong too, but that doesn't make US culture similar to China either. The US is a huge country, #3 in the world by population. Of course it's going to have a lot of foreign-language speakers, especially when there's a ton of Spanish-speaking countries to the south and a lot of immigration from there. But that doesn't mean that the dominant culture in America today is extremely similar to the culture of Mexico; I'd argue that German culture is more similar to American culture. At least German culture is universalist, rather than particularist as are Latin American cultures.
Just to play devils advocate do you think that is the case if they don't speak the language? If they don't share the same values? If they stick to their own groups and don't integrate, does it really make your life more interesting and diverse?
We don't have enough people that picks Strawberry crops in California or does home construction in suburbs. We literally don't have those people willing to do those jobs, which can cause runaway inflation.
Immigration is not about adding more of the same. It's about filling holes in our economy and labor force.
How many Canadians do you think are going to go picking Strawberries in California?
Reading you other replies, I'm not sure if I understand the perspective you're coming from, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I'm curious. Do you consider yourself anti-union?
The perspective I'm coming from is "it's complicated". An example is about the Wal Mart here in the DC area, which tried to ban them a few years ago. You'd figure an wealthy liberal city like DC would forever ban them in favor of some fancy locally grown organic co-op farmers market or some crap like that. When the city council meetings came up to approve/disapprove them, the people that came up speak requesting approval were all the poor and the elderly, that relied on their low prices to make ends meet. Wal Mart in DC was approved.
And I would consider myself strong-union. At the very least every incorporated company that has any employee should have an employee representative on their board-of-directors.
Then increase the wage paid. You're literally arguing for a slave-wage underclass.
And you are literally asking for runaway inflation. Guess who pays for that the most at a rate higher than the rest of society? The poor and the elderly on fixed income.
Do you want to punish the poor and elderly on fixed income because millennials can't be bothered to work hard labor because it might interrupt their precious time?
Maybe you would like to take away the healthcare for the poor and elderly as well?
Has anyone actually tried paying $25 per hour plus benefits for strawberry picking?
Let me guess, you're entirely consistent in your beliefs and likewise oppose the $15/hour minimum wage for fast food workers. Because after all, that would lead to runaway inflation.
Yes. Actually here's one article about farmers offering $25/hr picking strawberries:
http://komonews.com/news/local/local-berry-farmers-lament-la...
Their crops are getting ruined because they can't get workers.
I can't believe people don't understand how comfortable the average millennial is in this life, and how completely unnecessary it is for them to work hard labor.
And there's no faking it in economics. If you artificially raise prices for unskilled labor, you're going to raise inflation, and now you're back to square one in needing to raise wages again.
We need to have wages tied with age and skill level/profession. A blanket minimum wage is just a dumb idea. Teenagers don't need $15/hour, as they should be at school. The head of a family household does.
Sounds like Mexicans weren't willing to do it either. What changed from year to year? Clearly there's something else at play if they couldn't even get Mexicans to do it. The article doesn't mention that the farmer is exclusively hiring legal citizens, Washington State is ranked 15th for Hispanic population, and the farm is near a major metro area, so I don't buy the argument that there aren't enough Mexicans available either. It's clearly something else.
> Teenagers don't need $15/hour, as they should be at school. The head of a family household does.
Great, now you've just created an incentive to not hire anyone older than some particular age in a low-skill industry.
I know tons of people who'd take that job.
Raise it to 100$ an hour and I'll volunteer to do it myself.
If prices go up, then prices go up. Supply and demand.
Which people are most affected by the change in price?
Labor is a small part of the total costs of farming. Large amounts of costs are in capital equipment, land, packaging, retail location selling and transportation.
If you are really worried about high priced items that affect poor people, then perhaps we should be getting more immigrants that create these expensive things like healthcare.
If you are a doctor, they should automatically approve your visa application. Lets drive down that price of healthcare! If you make 100k+, auto approval as well. More tax money please! NOT strawberry workers though.
My father lives in rural Alabama and is a proud red neck. But he's a transplant and a little less provincial than many native Alabamians. I visited him a few years ago and noted how many Mexicans and Central Americans had moved into the area, starting from basically none 20 years ago.
Most of southern Alabama and the Florida Panhandle is timber land, much of it owned by paper companies. As he explained it to me, at some point the locals became averse to planting new trees. It's back-breaking manual labor. Immigrants filled in the gaps until at some [inflection] point the work all of sudden became "Mexican work", which pretty much guaranteed no white or black native would ever work it again no matter the wage. In a very short timeframe you saw a large influx of Mexicans and Central Americans as the baton was passed from poor whites to poor immigrants. It was to my mind something of an oddity in the rural Deep South, at least since the last influx of Scottish and Irish a hundred-plus years ago.
If the immigrants weren't available, I have no doubt that the paper companies would have turned to automation. The machines they operate to harvest trees are marvels. A machine for planting saplings probably isn't that difficult; indeed, it probably already exists. Doubtless the days of manual sapling planting are already numbered. Nonetheless, the influx of immigrants was a small economic boon that the locals would have appreciated were it not for the typical racist and nativist sentiments almost universally held.
As my father put it, it's absolutely ridiculous that they look down on hard-working immigrants doing the work that they recently once performed but now feel themselves too good to do. To be clear, the unemployment rate in that area is much higher than the national rate, and always has been. But irony of ironies, the social safety net (such as it is in Alabama) provides just enough comfort that poor whites can get by without having to do such work. Mind you, "get by" is still incredibly impoverished, but in that neck of the woods expectations are much lower than most of the rest of the country.
Anyhow, I don't mean to argue with the notion that immigration has historically been used to suppress wages, and that it can contribute to greater income inequality. On the whole I agree with that--it historically has, even though I don't think it's a necessary outcome of immigration. But higher wages isn't always an answer. There are structural and cultural reasons that act as a barrier to natives (especially white natives) performing certain tasks, particularly in historically poor areas where both structural and cultural influences are exaggerated.
That said, maybe automation in this case would have been better than supplementing the unskilled labor pool. Maybe the wages paid to a few skilled machine operators would have been better for the community than the low wages paid to a large number of new manual laborers. It's all a very complex subject. What is certain is that there was no third alternative; higher wages for the manual labor was never gonna happen.
Also, all labor is "exploitation". Does your company pass through 100% of the value you add to the organization? I seriously doubt it.
Meaningful exploitation would be, say, Alabama benefitting from Mexican immigrant labor while simultaneously discouraging or preventing their children from going to public school.
Now, sending immigrants back home might put an end to that kind of exploitation. But it's disingenuous to say that it's a favor to them to do so. It also ignores the fact one could also end the exploitation by, you know, ending the unfair treatment.
Not everyone deserves to be treated equally. If you are the same as everyone else, what use are you? You become unnecessary. That is the fundamental rationale of life - we are not all the same chunk of organic matter.
Ensuring disparity is a good thing. Your life won't change because a rich person exists.
Also, anything can be considered "exploitative".
We should be importing impoverished foreigners in order to give them a better life here in the US, because that's what they want.
If you can't compete against these impoverished foreigners, then that's your fault, not theirs.
Ok.
Standing here, looking out the window at the cold snow blowing, I can say that I would very much prefer to be picking strawberries in California at the moment.
All else being equal though, I don't see how you could make the claim that the U.S. is engaged in favouritism between equally-promising Canadian and Mexican potential immigrants. Mexicans and Canadians both (technically) need to get permits to work in the U.S.
Who do you think is better for controlling the US inflation rate?
Anyway, there's no point in enhancing the productivity of U.S. domestic agriculture. It is incredibly productive and food is incredibly cheap at the wholesale level. If it becomes a bit more expensive at the wholesale level, I doubt that will shift the consumer price all that much. The people who would have more trouble affording food would also have higher mean income, since they would be more likely to be employed.