The Foreign Visa Crackdown Is Putting Americans Out of Work
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
But the argument that Americans won't take these jobs is and always had been bullshit. They'll take the jobs if you pay well enough. A whole lot of the American economy runs on effectively indentured servitude, either from illegal immigrants working under the table, or legal immigrants trapped in jobs because of the terms of their visa or literal prisoners or literal slave labor from sweatshops in developing countries and it depresses salaries for everyone.
We have an expectation for the price of goods and services that's based on the idea that the less privileged should do shitty backbreaking work for next to nothing.
One of the things that had lead to the rise of vile, xenophobic populists like trump has been the complete unwillingness of both parties to address this, and the unwillingness of Americans to recognize that the cheap shit they buy from Walmart and amazon has real human costs.
Taking a job and doing it with sufficient attention/quality/skills/etc. are two different things. No money would make most of Americans working 110F strawberry field for any prolonged period of time. Even $1M/day - most would just quit after a week with cool $7M (at least i'd :)
Of course, the immigration system making illegals pretty much slaves is just a shame for a civilized society and has to be replaced with more humane system. We should value and respect people doing such hard and undesirable jobs. Practically it means at least minimum wage and all the labor laws irrespective of status (one of the effects otherwise is just breeding predatory employers and that drugs the society back and lower). And of course the minimum wage in US should already be 2x-3x what it is now (the current minimum wage in US is another shame for a civilized society)
The US is addicted to cheap goods. In many sectors cheap goods can't be had without cheap labor.
Yeap - a real shame.
Add in the other highly paid C-level people in WFC and
Split that with the median paid and below employees would mean about $3000/year.
For a full-time teller making about $30K/year that is a 10% salary difference.
I do call that much more than a "small" raise.
> Wells Fargo employee is a
scapegoat
I would love to see CxO salaries drop across the board, but I don't see that happening any time soon.
And regardless, as other sibling posts point out, firing the CEO and distributing the salary to the rank-and-file wouldn't improve their situation by all that much.
The real danger here is not that Americans will be deprived of strawberries. The danger is that some American who does not actually harvest strawberries will not be able to profit so much from strawberries. Their business will be in jeopardy. It is obviously bad for America when we drive businesses out of business. American business people need to be able to have somebody else do all the work very cheaply so that the American business person can profit.
If nobody values your product enough to pay its true costs, the answer is to reduce costs by having somebody else work cheaper. If the free market doesn't support cheaper labor costs, you need to use some other method to reduce labor costs. Wielding control of immigration status is one tool to incent cheaper labor.
What if you can't? Do we just do without strawberries, then?
Perhaps you should look up Woofing.
Anecdotal counter-point: there are plenty of Americans making decent money in similar conditions working marijuana farms on the West coast during harvest seasons. I have met a few and they do not complain about the work.
I grew up in the Midwest and my white middle class brothers spent some summers in strawberry fields picking and in corn fields detassling (not 110F, but mid 90's). There aren't many immigrants there so you'll find tons of lower-middle/lower class white Americans in those jobs.
Landscaping is mostly white, maids are mostly white, and construction work is mostly white. Becase most people there are white. Take a trip to the Midwest and see how the rest of the country lives.
WHAT are you talking about?
> Landscaping is mostly white, maids are mostly white, and construction work is mostly white
I can't say anything about landscaping or maids, I've never noticed, but construction work is not mostly white, or at least, you can't simply discount the number of non-white construction workers.
In my experience, immigrants in the Midwest are simply more segregated than in other places.
I grew up in the suburbs of one of the largest cities in my state (city pop. 110,000 - suburb pop. 25,000). If I go onto wikipedia it says my suburb was and still is 90%+ white (closer to 97% when I was growing up) and the city is currently 82% white, 1% asian, and 2.5% hispanic (and these numbers have become more diverse since 15-20 years ago when I was growing up).
Visiting Chicago, St. Louis, Louisville, and other large cities in the Midwest will not give you a good idea how most people in the Midwest live.
At least half of the immigrants or children of immigrants I met while growing up actually didn't do service work. No one wants to move to bumfuck nowhere with little diversity, little job opportunity, and no major hub for anything nearby.
Lots of Asian immigrants that came due to a Toyota plant that was built somewhat close to my suburb, lots of Indian and Middle-Eastern physicians, and about 1/10 of the Hispanic immigrants seemed to own their own restaurant/chain of restaurants.
It's seriously crazy how different the world I grew up in is compared to the one most liberal, coastal, upper-middle class people experienced (the bubble I'm in now). I really wish everyone on the coasts could take a year to live in the middle-of-nowhere flyover country, it's amazing how Americans struggle to even believe the experiences of their fellow countrymen in different geographic regions.
If you want to pay market rates for labor, there is nothing stopping you from doing so. You are more than welcome to pay $30+ an hour for babysitting. You'll find people tripping over themselves to take your job.
Everybody wants immigrants to be paid more until it's you that has to pay them. Then you'll find you're just as price conscious as everybody else.
The truth here is that this is a really hard problem. Nobody likes the externalization of costs onto the disenfranchised. But once price expectations are set, the expectation that they're always going to go down, that you're going to get more for less, is also set. That's just how markets and human nature work.
You can make an individual decision to pay more for a particular class of good, but on the whole the entire market is focused on delivering more for less, and even if you hang out your shingle and deliver more for more, you will always have a niche clientele because if it were more than niche, then your model wouldn't be profitable anymore. Someone else is going to offer your product for less, and they will eat your market share.
I'd offer counter-examples of houses, and stocks. Not everything goes down in price, only things that people don't borrow for.
The price of construction is not the same as the price of housing. The price of construction has only gone down over time, because it's constrained only by time and materials, not scarcity.
By your argument, actual slavery should have never been made illegal because it would just hurt the us in the marketplace. After all, anybody could have paid more for non slave produced cotton, if they chose.
By "for this" do you mean "to have a decent minimum wage"?
The contrary is called Social Dumping:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_dumping
That's, for instance, what Margaret Thatcher did during the 80' in the UK when the working class people asked for better conditions.
edit: hn thread from the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11138086
Sure, they have a "choice," they don't have to drive 250 miles and stay at their jobs for a week for low pay. But sleeping in your car to be able to work is, as the say, "not normal." The only reason Uber is able to get away with this is because their drivers' choices are limited. Just like the Jamaicans and similar that come to America to pick and serve strawberries. They're exploited because it's possible.
It's a dilemna, I realize. I rarely go stay at a B&B, for example, and if the B&B paid "American, livable" wages, they'd be too expensive for me to ever go. So maybe a business that provides "services" for things like a place to sleep (and someone to clean up after you) and something to eat (and someone to cook and clean up after you) is simply not sustainable (even though those exploited people would probably rather have the job than not).
Maybe there shouldn't be lots of hotels, restaurants and car services, except for the niche that serve people willing and able to pay enough for those services to in turn pay equitable wages.
Pretty tough to figure out, for me.
(It's because capitalists have stolen all the property and are renting it back to you.)
What I don't understand is why non-CEOs believe it so dogmatically.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/dining/restaurants-no-tip...
Doesn't sound all that terrible.
[1] https://www.dn.no/nyheter/2017/06/02/0942/Handel/nordea-sjef... (Norwegian, statement by head of the Nordea bank)
I may choose not to buy it, but that doesn't mean I am unhappy. It may mean I can't afford it.
If a product costs $0.25 to produce plus a few finger off little children working in the factory, but we don't pay for fingers... then the product doesn't really cost $0.25 to produce. So I can pay $0.25 plus higher taxes to pay for dismemberment medical, or higher taxes to pay for police to arrest dismembered people from stealing for a living, or higher costs from being mugged every so often by fingerless bandits.
Not paying a living wage has costs to the consumer and everyone else in society.
This is why I am opposed to minimum wage: My child does not need to make a living wage bagging groceries. I want them to have a job for the life experience, but they don't pay rent or utilities or a car payment or a grocery bill. If they have skills to land a $30/hr job, great! But they don't have those skills. They have no skills and no credentials. I want them to get a summer job so they can start building. The wage doesn't matter.
Here's another reason: I have a great job with great benefits. I also have spare time. I don't mind doing side jobs for peanuts if I find value in the work. For instance, I might teach a class at the local community college. I don't do this for the money, but for other reasons. Is this fair to other teachers whom I displace? Well... I think so. If they want job security they should get skilled at something with more security. Imagine if the cost of medical school got cut in half because so many successful doctors spent some of their free time working part-time at medical schools for $5/hr.
Is a minimum wage preventing doctors from working part-time at medical schools? Of course not. But there are many circumstances where a minimum wage and other well-meaning labor laws are having a detrimental effect.
I know that if we dropped all protections for workers, many workers would allow employers to take advantage of them. So I don't know the right balance. But I would err on letting the worker make the call.
One more thought, though, is that we have reached a point where we can produce far more than we consume. There is just less need for labor. So we are seeing growing pains as we continue the everlasting wrestle over who controls and benefits from the means of production. In a world where we only need 40% of the population to be able to produce enough for everybody, how do you decide who does how much work and who benefits how much from their work?
The historical answer is, pay people to play games while other people watch. That way, we can employ people to produce nothing. So you end up with one person who works 80 hours a week to barely support their family while another person refuses to play another game unless they get paid $100K to play it. That is because YOU are willing to pay $100 to go to see people play a game, but balk at paying $1/pound for onions.
There's also no bright line between the generally bad actors and the good guys. Even R&D-oriented high tech companies that often use H1-B for the intended purpose of importing otherwise unobtainable talent also use H1-B (and other methods like anti-poaching agreements) for wage suppression.
Reform needs to be flexible and enforced by financial incentives, like auctioning visas at a high reserve. It does not need to be cheap for employers.
Other causes of recent wage suppression include the no-poaching and other gentlemen agreements among the big players in the Valley. In addition the basic, I'm not going to pay more than the other guy (or the minimum I can get away with).
Wage suppression comes in other forms too. Asking for previous salaries, asking for W2s etc... Some companies are so large that they just refuse to pay more as well. But that's just "the market" at that point. In every company there's some maximum value for you.
The only way to escape this is to start your own company.
"Employers find the H-2B program expensive and bureaucratic, and tend to reserve it for hard-to-fill jobs that are critical to expanding operations." (American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy, 2011)*
vs.
"In the Pentagoet’s case, that’s meant six women from Jamaica (about a fifth of the total staff) who work in housekeeping and in the kitchen."
Are housekeeping and kitchen jobs hard to fill, critical to expanding operations, and worth significant investment? I'm just confused about H1-B in general and what it's supposed to do. Bring high-skilled workers? Provide cheap, seasonal labor? Both?
*Paraphrased for readability. Original quote hedges the conclusion.
No. In the Pentagoet's case, this is about being able to find pre-trained workers without paying the market rate. This place has gone out of their way to establish travel and housing, yet completely failed to look in any major urban area for staff. Ask yourself why that is.
Looking forward to more insightful articles from Bloomberg.
Go to a restaurant in Tokyo, for the most part the cooks server and other staff are Japanese --you will see a smattering of foreign staff, but it's not nearly the same as in the US. And that is in an economy with an aging population and decreasing population.
And things are not super expensive. Food is healthy and reasonably priced. Some foodstuffs cost more than the equivalent in the US but Japanese are quite willing to pay the price difference to keep their farmers afloat --many times have they imposed barriers to cheaper imported foodstuffs but they like things their way.
Point is, it's not pre-ordained to ruin an economy.
Just wanted to make sure that FOSS hadn't made everyone open borders evangelicals.
Many demographics have huge unemployment problems, mostly NEETs, because the jobs they used to do are replaced by absolute lowest wage immigrants. This problem has been long brewing in the US, and I just don't understand how making it worse (more immigration) is going to solve it. At the same time I know I'm a massive beneficiary with overseas production of my products and cheap food at home.
Also, why is HN posting pure political articles so much now? I understand technology intersects with politics, but at this point anyone strongly advocating for saving the H#B programs are probably H1B beneficiary companies which are only the Big tech companies, so a story like this feels like it's rolled out to the tech community to soften you up to the plight of the H2B community.
If that's the case, this is nothing more than a propaganda feed.
Economics term, growing subset of mostly disconnected young men across NA / EU.
Am I getting trolled?
Sure there will be increased turnover and more expenses spent on hiring, but that should be accepted as a standard cost of doing business. Also, hiring young people is better for the community. When a young person has their own job they learn responsibility, money management, and are contributing to the economy instead of getting into trouble.
The numbers of young people working part-time or over the summer has dropped significantly in the past 30 years. I wonder if the ease of getting visas for seasonal labor has contributed to that.
I imagine there's no shortage of low-skill workers available in the united states, shipping people in from afar seems outrageous.
> including the costs of the newspaper ads they have to take out as part of the process, plus (...), they’ve already spent thousands of dollars they won’t get back.
Assuming a 40 hour work week, they could increase the hourly wage by $4+/hr. and spend the same amount of money. That's a ~50% increase from minimum wage.
Now I feel for the business in this particular case. They had a process, they followed it, spend their money, and got staff. Now the process has changed, but they've already spent the money. It's a sunk cost. That sucks.
The question is, are these businesses being artificially propped up by foreign low paid workers, or is it a symptom of jobs paying too low for any American to actual work?
UK: it tends to be waiting/bar staff in my local Universities as lower skill requirements and more flexible working times
That's interesting - I wonder what the conditions are?
Amen...and I find it doubly cool because my degree is from the economics department at UC Davis.