Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

I'm strongly in favor of open borders and immigration, as long as immigrants have all the same workplace protections as American citizens.

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.

> as long as immigrants have all the same workplace protections as American citizens.

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.

You're not making a meaningful argument.

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.

> 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.

I'd offer counter-examples of houses, and stocks. Not everything goes down in price, only things that people don't borrow for.

Not all goods are the same. The prices of stocks and houses vary according to the demand, this is for all scarce assets. Labor demand varies with price.

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.

Which is why you have treaties and laws that protect people.

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.

Slavery had a simple legal solution, abolition. The political will to enact it had to be generated with a civil war. What would you propose as a legal solution for this? And how dearly do you think we would need to pay for it?

> What would you propose as a legal solution for this?

By "for this" do you mean "to have a decent minimum wage"?

What defines "decent"? And even if you could come up with an appropriate algorithm for it, you realize this essentially constitutes price fixing, right? And that it won't actually fix the problem of getting Americans to take jobs that they wouldn't ordinarily take because the wage for them is too low?

Not saying it's an easy calculation, but as "a legal solution" it already exists.

>They'll take the jobs if you pay well enough.

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)

Actually I think $40/hr (obviously not a real number) would get quite a large labor migration to the strawberry fields. North Dakota saw a huge influx of out-of-work men when oil was booming.

Sure, and then the price of strawberries goes up, and grocery shoppers complain and don't buy them.

The US is addicted to cheap goods. In many sectors cheap goods can't be had without cheap labor.

Erhm, you can't be addicted to cheap goods if cheap goods don't exist. People weren't any less materialistic in the 60's they just had less cheap stuff to buy. Business push prices down to make more money not because they have to satiate rabid consumers.

Yeap - A real shame if the CEOs had to take a lower paycheck in order to pay their workers more.

Yeap - a real shame.

There are probably some exceptions but in most businesses you could eliminate the CEO salary altogether and there wouldn't be enough savings to give "the workers" more than a very small raise.

[Former] Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf made 473 times more than the salary of a median employee, according to Bloomberg. That ratio of CEO-to-employee pay puts Wells Fargo at No. 33 among S&P 500 companies and third highest among financial institutions on the list. He earned $19.3 million in total compensation last year.

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.

But the median-wage Wells Fargo employee is a crook who defrauds Wells Fargo employees. It is not right that those employees should profit from abusing customers. Clearly, top-tier executives should be the ones to profit from this.

Correction:

> Wells Fargo employee is a

scapegoat

Right, but you wouldn't split it equally. You'd split it proportionally based on what each employee actually makes, so the $30k/yr employee would get less than a $3k raise.

I'm of course fine with CEOs getting lower pay, but is that a realistic outcome?

Yes it is.

Is it actually realistic, or would you just like it to be? Executives obviously resist downward motion on their salaries, and collectively they have a decent amount of clout: there are enough companies with crazy inflated CxO salaries that if your board doesn't offer what the candidate pool wants, you don't fill that position.

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.

You are exactly right. But who said that strawberries should be inexpensive and found in every fridge in America? What you have just acknowledged is that strawberries are not cheap. They should not be cheap.

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.

> If the free market doesn't support cheaper labor costs, you need to use some other method to reduce labor costs.

What if you can't? Do we just do without strawberries, then?

Strawberries will be grown in Mexico and shipped here.

The slave system only prevents further automation

From experience of both Sweden and the US, levels of automation are an order of magnitude higher here in Sweden. Then again, taxi drivers, cleaners, and waitresses earn a living wage here and are respected members of society.

Yeah, that's kind of his point, I understood: If you have to pay humane wages, you have a stronger incentive to invest in automation.

It also kills the human-robot job, where basically a normal human is taken and his brain is replaced for 8 hours with a mobile app, running a task.

Yet somehow the mining industry doesn't seem to have problems paying highly trained people to sit underground for 10+ hours a day sitting around explosives and heavy machinery.

Perhaps you should look up Woofing.

> No money would make most of Americans working 110F strawberry field for any prolonged period of time.

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.

This is the bubble you live in.

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.

> There aren't many immigrants there

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.

If you're talking "big" Midwest cities, yea there's definitely segregation. But go out into the sticks a bit or 30 minutes outside any city and it's mostly white.

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.

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