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Comment by meri_dian | Hacker News Reader

That's naive, the wages they're paid are what people are willing to pay them. Most are paid illegally so setting a minimum wage won't really help, and even if the minimum wage was followed, it surely wouldn't provide for a reasonable existence in an expensive major city which attracts migrants.

If you raise the minimum wage high enough so that it provides for a liveable wage in a major city and are able to enforce it, then the amount of people willing to pay migrants for work will collapse and the migrants will stop coming to the city.

So you either accept the conditions and wages the migrants are being paid, or you eliminate the very reason migrants travel to cities in the first place.

I want everyone to live in comfort, but it's much more complicated than "just open all the borders and raise minimum wage".

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One reason migrants anywhere get paid less is not economics but exploitation: They have limited power, including legal rights and limited access to the legal system to enforce those rights. Unfortunately, others exploit them.

> If you raise the minimum wage high enough so that it provides for a liveable wage in a major city and are able to enforce it, then the amount of people willing to pay migrants for work will collapse and the migrants will stop coming to the city.

While I understand the theory, the reality in places that raise minimum wage is much more complex.

Regardless of the solutions chosen to make cities a better place, closed borders and immigration quotas are descrimination. People should be treated equally.

Why should all people be treated equally? Shouldn't a community have a right to set its own goals and standards? Shouldn't it have a right to decide how to balance the needs of its own people with the needs of its neighbors?

Anecdotally, tens of thousands of people have been moving to my city every year for over a decade. The rents have increased dramatically, forcing many out of their homes. Traffic is horrible. A few years ago, a severe drought led to serious water disputes between the city and nearby farmers. We're doing much better now, but another drought will come, eventually, and with all of the extra people, it will surely be worse. At the end of the day, there are only so many folks that an area can support at all, let alone comfortably.

In the US, at least, we are Constitutionally entitled to the equal protection of the law. So no, communities don’t get to make laws that explicitly privilege their own residents.

That’s why the Bay Area operates through proxies like building permits and rent control - explicit immigration restrictions are a violation of citizens’ rights and would be easily smacked down in court.

It doesn’t matter how convenient it would be to control migration - if you want to do that, you need to secede. The American community has rights that supersede your neighborhood’s.

People should be treated equally because it’s the compassionate and the right thing to do. I assume you want to be treated equally as well? Regarding the problems you attribute to people simply moving to the area you live in, those problems can be dealt with in ways that don’t exclude others. They also aren’t your problems, but problems shared by everyone including the people who recently moved there.

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