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> A take-away I had from Trump's election was that there still is a lot of economic struggle in the interior of the US. Nobody seems to be interested in improving the situation, and very few of these communities have the means and/or the willingness to move towards greener pastures. Is there anything that can be done to improve the situation?

I work in a typical liberal as hell company in a very expensive city. The level of hate/class superiority towards the unwashed masses from my co-workers is absolutely mind blowing. It is casual hate that shows up everywhere, every day in a unrelated conversations. If one was to do s/<who they talk about>/gay|minority/g they would be terminated on the spot. It goes all the way up the corporate latter. All of them are card carrying progressives.

I live in SF, work in tech, and do not share this experience at all. Not sure what environment you’re in but that’s far from ubiquitous.

I'm going to make an educated guess that you are not even noticing it because it is that common.

My office is extremely political in discussion topics. It would be noticed and not looked favorably upon.

I didn't realize how outright prejudice I was when it came to the stereotypical Trump true believer until after this election. It just never crossed my mind. I'm African American grew up middle class but I saw and interacted with plenty of poorer minorities but never poorer Whites - I went to a predominantly white private school, but by definition if they were at private school, they weren't poor.

Went into tech and only interacted with other white collar workers.

Of course I don't agree with Trumps demonization of "other" but I do see how he easily tapped into their resentment. People don't seem to realize how many Trump voters in middle America voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012.

Hillary Clinton had Donald Trump beat by millions in the popular vote. I suspected it was more or less the same conservative base, with Democratic voters less enthusiastic in rural/suburban America.

In the rules of the NFL team that has the ball longest is not the team that wins the game - team that scores does. Those are the rules.

I'm not sure that it's a bad thing that the electoral college is used for deciding the presidential election and that the senate isn't representational of the population. Even considering that "my side" loss twice because of it.

The needs of the least populous states - trump country -have been ignored in the national conversation for too long by both parties. Trump was just paying lip service to their needs and is actively selling them out. But no one else was even paying lip service.

I'm not part of Trump's core demographics - both a minority and part of the "liberal tech elite" but a lot of his policies will help me a lot more than they will help people who voted for him.

Yeah I'm ignoring the so called "moral majority", there is no hope for them. Hopefully changing demographics will continue to make them even less relevant.

It is irrelevant if rules are bad or rules are good. It is only relevant what the rules are at the time of the competition.

Rules can always be changed but it must be done before the beginning of the game.

I hear the same things in DC. Even (maybe especially) from people who work in government.

That's not being a progressive. They can call themselves whatever they want but we don't want them.

> Nobody seems to be interested in improving the situation

Plnty of us are interested. But people with enough money to pay for their own media, and their own politicans and party, they are really not interested.

I think it takes less than most of us imagine -- but more than most of us are capable of organizing.

If you wanted to build complexes to stimulate the economy, you'd probably need on the order of... $100M in buildings, and another $100M in endowments for operating expenses/grants/risky loans.

So 200M is a lot, but it's also only the retirement wealth of 100-200 upper-middle class families, of which there will be thousands per major metro (and perhaps a million or so across the US).

I think it's mostly a logistics problem -- in those million families, there are probably 10,000 that are interested in resettling to the middle of the country and would be willing to move half of their wealth into local investments on a generational scale (while keeping the other half in say, the market).

That means we could do 250-500 self-sustaining mixed-use complexes backed by endowments for operations costs, which is probably enough to target 50-100 towns.

The question becomes the organizational aspects of those people finding each other, building trust (between each other and with the involved communities), and finding the appropriate legal instrument to manage the money on that scale.

These are all much harder problems than finding money or media attention.

>Is there anything that can be done to improve the situation?

Yes, but it's all the things that "coastal elites" don't want to hear. The first two topics of conversation would likely be about trade and immigration policy. But it's hard to talk about either without being shouted down as xenophobic or racist. It's worth noting that Obama ran on a platform to renegotiate NAFTA during his first primary.

What evidence is there that protectionism and further raising of the immigration barrier would actually solve any of these problems?

Yes. The immigration barrier is simply supply and demand. Just as the H1Bs have been used to keep the wages of the American middle class down, so has the open floodgates of illegal immigration kept the wages of poor Americans down.

With regards to protectionism I don't know what more evidence you could need aside from the changes to the US economy brought on by NAFTA, which were all predicted. It's been fine for the economy as a whole, but we're not talking about things like the GDP. We're talking about the economic well-being of the people who used to manufacture things in the US. Watch carefully, because that is the sleight of hand that unrelentingly responds to any talk of protectionism. They talk about sound economic theory about how protectionism impacts things like GDP. Not the topic at hand.

There are only 85000 H1B Visas allowed each year. There are about 3.5 to 4 million developers in the US. If all of the H1B Visas allowed in the country were developers, it really couldn't depress wages that much.

As far as reigning in illegal immigration, there have been reports all across the country that farmers are losing money because they can't find enough people at any price who are willing to do farm work since the crackdown.

>There are only 85000 H1B Visas allowed each year.

85,000 NEW H1Bs are issued each year, they last 3 years and can be extended for another 3. So right off the bat that's as many as half a million. There is no issue limit on H1Bs for universities and non-profits. In 2012 alone, for example, the total number of H1Bs (normal + university/non-profit) issued was 135,530. It's safe to say there are far more than 85,000 H1Bs in the US.

>because they can't find enough people at any price who are willing to do farm work since the crackdown.

I suspect their definition of "any price" is very different than mine.

At any price that they could still harvest the food and sell it at a price that people would be willing to buy the food.

I suspect the consumers will get over it once hunger sets in. I'm not really sympathetic to the consumers who may lose access to artificially low pricing subsidized by policies intending to keep wages low amongst the poorest people in our country.

Poor people already often can't afford healthy food. What do you think happens when food prices go up because farmers have to pay 5x as much to attract labor? Yes there are farmers who are offering five times as much and still can't find reliable labor.

On the other hand, I'm sure overprocessed sodium filled food and fast food will become a lot more attractive than even what it is today.

>Poor people already often can't afford healthy food.

That's a serious problem, if only there was some way to raise their wages.

>farmers have to pay 5x as much to attract labor

Yep, there it is. Some of those poor people will transition to these new higher wages in farming. This will reduce labor supply in other sectors which will push wages up across the board. Rinse and repeat for other industries full of illegal immigrants: construction, maid services, etc.

That's not what's happening. Americans have alternatives to hard manual labor - welfare, "disability", food stamps etc.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/05/15/north...

If welfare and food stamps are better than performing farm labor then farm wages and working conditions clearly haven't improved enough yet.

I accept your data/claims at face value, that illegal immigration and temporary worker visas have suppressed wages of the poor in some sectors so much that even increasing the wage 5x is insufficient to attract native laborers. What we disagree on is whether or not that wage suppression is a good thing.

If welfare and food stamps are better than performing farm labor then farm wages and working conditions clearly haven't improved enough yet.

It's farm labor - how much can working conditions improve while you are actually doing your job? If I had a choice between making minimum wage and getting government assistance and doing back breaking labor at $20 an hour, I'm not sure that I wouldn't take the minimum wage job and make the commensurate lifestyle choices - roommates, public transportation instead of a car, or if I were so inclined being a part of the underground economy.

How many unemployed people are physically capable of doing that kind of work?

I can't speak to farming, but I know the going day labor rate, usually construction, for random (illegal) immigrants you can pick up at Home Depot is $20/hr minimum around here. So you'll certainly have to do better than that to get natives. Again, if $20/hr isn't enough, the market will adjust until it is enough.

Who cares whether unemployed people are capable of hard physical labor? Plenty of people in the country are capable, so farm wages will just have to compete against other sectors. And when it does, it will raise the wages of EVERYONE in those other sectors because people will leave for the higher wage farm work. This is the mechanism I keep bringing you back to about how it helps all the poor, not just the ones who take the farm labor jobs.

If everything costs more - especially a necessity like food, how does that not cause inflation and lead everyone Back to the same place? The whole food chain operates on thin margins so they can't eat the cost and reduce their profits.

If labor makes up 50% of the cost of a product, doubling the labor cost doubles the money the worker gets but only increases retail prices by 50%. This is still a great deal for the worker.

Why do you feel it's okay to bring in desperately poor brown people to do work that you claim Americans won't do at even 5x the rate we pay the desperately poor people? Why shouldn't back-breaking work bring in a wage that is competitive with the broader market? Why is it okay to flood the market with an over-supply of desperately poor people? Do you think it would have any impact on your income if we brought in 10s of millions of workers to compete against you in whatever you do for a living?

Because the alternative for the "desperate poor people" to getting poor wages is not getting any wages? Do you think they would be better off not getting anything?

So you want to help the poor from other countries at the expense of poor from your own country, which coincidentally benefits you in the form of cheaper produce. That's awfully generous of you.

How many of the native poor are competing for jobs in the fields? If food prices for me go up by 50% I might grumble, suck it up and pay for it. The poor aren't going to have any choice but to eat cheaper less healthy food.

And if food is more expensive to produce in the US because of labor costs, why would it be any different from anything else - the big companies will either start selling cheaper (less healthy) substitutes, or import it from places with cheaper labor.

>The poor aren't going to have any choice but to eat cheaper less healthy food.

As we've covered, repeatedly, reduced supply of labor will increase the wages of those poor you're worried about buying food. Based on the first google results I could find farm labor constitutes 10-20% of the cost of food. Even at the high end, if you DOUBLE the wages of farm labor the price goes up 20% but wages go up 100%. And this same principle applies to every sector where new farm labor is pulled from. Wages go up more than prices, so it's a net win. This is great for the poor worker, but bad for the wealthy worker who doesn't get raises due to this increased competition on the low end of wages. To the extent that the wage gap might be a concern of yours, this is one significant way to reduce the wage gap using market forces.

> the big companies will either start selling cheaper (less healthy) substitutes

Millions of new potential customers have extra money in their pocket to be able to afford luxury food products. Meanwhile there are far fewer impoverished people looking to buy food (migrant/illegal workers). So if anything, it increases the market for luxury goods and decreases the market for cheaper unhealthy substitutes.

>import it from places with cheaper labor.

This is only a problem if you believe 100% of the illegal and temporary work visa produced goods could be replaced with imports. Not only is that not true, but even if it WERE true, that doesn't say anything about other sectors predominately filled with migrant/illegal workers such as hotel maid services or construction. My house, in my neighborhood, is not going to be built by someone who isn't physically here.

I feel we've sufficiently covered the initial premise, which is that the policy I've described helps poor middle Americans. You might be able to debate the extent to which it would help them, or that this is good for the over-all economy/country, but it's undeniable that artificially increasing supply of labor in some sectors drives down wages for everyone in those sectors and in the labor markets that compete with those sectors.

I'm going to presume that your family has a combined income of 100k or more.

Lets engage in a very simple intellectual exercise:

remove all immigration restrictions and all protections that we have.

Do you believe that

a) your family in a short term would be better off/not different/the worse off?

b) your family in a long term would be better off/not different worse off?

Well, the first is false and the idea of removing all restrictions was not under suggestion, so I don't see how this is relevant?

Ok, so we agree that some restrictions on immigration must exist?

I'm not the person you asked, but I'll give it a shot.

In the short term I think I would be much better off. I don't believe enough people who can compete with me economically would be all that interested in coming here, and/or them coming here doesn't improve their ability to compete with me. However, I'd be able to hire poor people for slave-like wages to perform all sorts of odd jobs for me around the house. I'd have a maid, etc.

In the long term I would be much worse off. The influx of poor people from other nations would completely overrun our public infrastructure: public schools, welfare programs, etc. The reason why illegal immigration "works" for the upper-middle and upper class is because it's illegal. My taxes would have to go through the roof to pay for all of this.

> In the short term I think I would be much better off. I don't believe enough people who can compete with me economically would be all that interested in coming here, and/or them coming here doesn't improve their ability to compete with me.

This is where I fundamentally disagree - every single developer in the US making US salaries will lose to eastern european/Indian/Chinese developer moving to the US because they will accept lower salary. Not much lower, but 20-30% lower because for them it would be amazing increase in their quality of life.

I'm already the lead for an off-shore team. There's nothing special about me being in the US, I'm not local to anyone I work with. If they could find an offshore resource to replace me at a 20-30% cost savings they would do it in a heartbeat.

Sweden is a good example of what happens in scenario b). The effects are immediate:

- shortage of housing

- ballooning social security budgets

- extreme long waiting times to get health care service

- a marked increase in crime, especially in certain categories (sex crimes, robbery, arson)

and long-lasting:

- taxes need to increase across the board with ~2% (in a country already burdened with close to the highest taxes in the world)

- costs for state pensions stand to double in the coming 20-30 years

- the real estate market will need to adjust to the new situation (oversupply in the high priced sector, a shortage in the low and medium price sectors)

- the labour market does not fit the education level of the new population. Available jobs require higher education levels than most immigrants have or can reach leading to high unemployment among immigrants. The extensive social security system and the related high taxation level takes away incentives - and in some cases actually presents negative incentives [1] - to go from state benefits to paid employment.

The situation in Sweden is made worse by the fact that the country officially does not mandate nor stimulate assimilation of immigrants into Swedish society while the native Swedish (and assimilated migrant) population do expect immigrants to assimilate to a large extent, leading to increased segregation [2].

[1] It is fully possible in Sweden to end up with a lower spendable income when moving from state benefits to paid employment, mostly due to the fact that those on state benefits often get extra benefits for specific purposes (e.g. housing costs).

[1] Sweden does not have a single monolithic constitution, instead relying on four fundamental laws (the Instrument of Government (Swedish: Regeringsformen), the Freedom of the Press Act (Swedish: Tryckfrihetsförordningen), the Fundamental Law on Freedom of Expression (Swedish: Yttrandefrihetsgrundlagen) and the Act of Succession (Swedish: Successionsordningen)). An 1974 amendment to the Instrument of Government act states that immigrants can choose to keep and strengthen their ethnic and cultural identity instead of assimilating into Swedish culture.

Just read an article in Fortune mag. about a venture capitalist that's working to move more remote tech jobs to middle America.

I hope he succeeds. The more we share jobs/experiences/wealth/etc. the more we'll understand each other.