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You can’t do a rewrite on something involving 10-20M jobs without a migration plan, which is essentially why huge complex problems don’t get solved. When you get into actually coming up with real plans, you end up in webs that just touch too many people. And trust me, these are not problems that are solved by throwing money, they’re deeply serious webs of entanglement that won’t be solved with simplification.

I’ll give you one counterexample, but trust me there’s millions of them. Meatpacking is overrun with off the books labor. You could throw around $15, $30 an hour salaries and it wouldn’t matter because salary isn’t the killer. It’s lawsuits from people falling in the equipment that simply go away when the laborer wasn’t supposed to be here. It’s being able to have something like coronavirus come around and react. I’m not repping the current system but catcalls to just solve it aren’t actually helpful, they’re a big reason why we are here in the first place.

I don't suggest it would be easy. But even the anecdotes from your comment indicate that it should be done.

'Border security' is not what defines migration patterns - its jobs. If everyone in the US must be paid a reasonable wage, irrespective of documentations status - then it's not only moral and fair, it's also civic. The entire system is deeply hypocritical.

A lot of jobs will disappear, some will get more automated, in some cases prices will be passed on.

I'm doubtful any of it will change: 'one side' is addicted to the votes, the 'other side' addicted to the profits, and secretly everyone is addicted to low prices.

Yeah that’s why this isn’t a serious argument, because no one is just going to watch a lot of jobs disappear or become automated etc without a plan. We’ve gone from “hey just do this one thing raise min wage” to “hey you know it’s gonna be painful and I don’t know fully what’s going to happen but you know, fairness”. No one would ever go for it, and for good reason.

There would never be a plan. The system did not plan on getting where it is, and it would not get out.

The best thing the government could do is provided visibility into the policies i.e. 'we're going to require $X min wage on this date, and $Y on this date, and after 20XX we're going to be checking on businesses, starting with fines in the first 6 months, and then more serious.

The system would have to adapt - and it absolutely could.

There is some possibility it would happen in that the notion of providing a 'living wage' to everyone would be popular, and it could by virtue of a Supreme Court ruling for example be extended to everyone. It would be then up to the government to theoretically enforce wages and standards for non-citizens, it comes down to the political will - plus - there will be millions pushing for it, thinking about their own personal gain, not necessarily piecing together the likelihood of keeping their jobs. I bet most undocumented workers, once they find out they are legally entitled to a bunch of things, and would have the protection of the justice system ... would push for their ostensible rights.

It would be a pragmatic solution to the 'gaping hole' in the economy, civility, lawlessness and solve a lot of problems at once.

Instead of ICE kicking out illegals, they turn on their head and start enforcing labour laws ... which paradoxically has a much more powerful effect on the border.

But yeah, very unlikely.

> you can live extremely well compared to anyone in 1970 just off Walmart.

If only Walmart sold healthcare, college education, and New York apartments.

Honestly, housing anywhere in the American West. In Boise, the median house price has gone up 54% since 2015. 84% of the city is zoned for single family homes.

>housing anywhere in the American West

The problem with the American west is that people from California (and the other wealthy coastal areas to a lesser extent) see it as within the range of places they'd consider moving too.

There's no universe in which an rapid infusion of people who have more money than the locals is not bad for every local not selling overpriced garbage to the newcomers for a fat margin.

You see the same problems on the east coast and in the southeast but you see them in more constrained geographical areas because people from NYC don't cash out move to Indiana or Mississippi, they move to Vermont or Pennsylvania.

Actually Wal-Mart does have health care facilities in some states now[0]. They will probably roll these out as they can but many states have politicians and embedded providers that will fight them tooth and nail. The most common means is through Certificate of Need, this basically means that the claim can be made the hospital or service is not needed as there are sufficient offerings in existence.

They also sell like other stores generic medicines at very low costs; the issue being is some reimbursement setups exclude some of these and some politicians did not like the idea of cheap medicines because it undermined their position.

[0] https://www.walmart.com/cp/care-clinics/1224932

If my only option was Walmart-quality healthcare, I'd probably be better off not using it.

Walmart provides a decent quality product at a decent price.

Their business is designed around tearing out margins in the value chain, and passing the savings along to customers. It's a business strategy unheard of - not only do they pass on a lot of savings, they force vendors to do so as well.

The healthcare system is completely fat with gristle, exactly what we need is a Walmart barking up the long-tail.

$15K-$20K for setting a broke arm? I don't think so. $30 for the Aspirin while you're at it? No. $2K for the scan? No goddam way.

Walmart would probably only get into things that could be 'very well operationalised' ie more common stuff.

And consider the vicious leverage they would have over drug makers ...

Healthcare is 15% of the economy and growing, Walmart tearing into Healthcare would be more transformative that the existence of Google.

For any service that Walmart provided, I would be glad to go there.

Have you bought clothes at Walmart? Shoes? How long did they last? Not long I'll bet.

I'm sure you can find some quality items at Walmart, but you have to shop carefully.

If we were talking Costco healthcare, I'd be all in. All the "cut the fat" talk you mention, and you still end up with a quality product at a reasonable price.

They're serving different market segments. Costco literally charges an admission fee. "Pay me money to come spend more money inside my store and it'll be really cool, promise" is the antithesis of the Walmart philosophy. Walmart itself recognizes this, which is why Sam's Club exists (no reason to let a competitor run away with that less price-sensitive market segment without a fight, of course).

For any arbitrary shopper-item combination, as long as the item can fit the basic merchantability requirements over the duration of the return period, the only significant criterion is going to be price. Knowing this and then ensuring that they have the cheapest merchantable items in every product class is how Walmart became the de-facto shopping nexus everywhere that major social and/or governmental interference hasn't stopped them. It's the place to go to get the stuff you have to buy, not the stuff you want to buy.

If your standards are too high to wear a shirt that consists of 80% recycled plastic, you don't buy shirts at Walmart. But that doesn't mean you automatically have the same high standards for a garden spade, a toilet seat, or a kitchen spatula. If we imagine that we need all four of these items today, we go to Walmart to buy the latter three and then use the money saved to invest in a better 100% cotton shirt from $FAVORITE_SHIRT_VENDOR.

> For any arbitrary shopper-item combination, as long as the item can fit the basic merchantability requirements over the duration of the return period, the only significant criterion is going to be price.

Disagree, quality matters.

I have purchased clothes, shoes, and just about every other household item at Walmart at some point in my life. The quality is no different from buying things in the same price range at any store, in person or online. Often, the stores are selling the exact same thing from the same manufacturers.

Lots of businesses do similar to Walmart. Walmart can still make huge profits. Amazon constantly does things cheaper, prices go down, customers benefit. Same as walmart, and those lower prices make it hard for competitors.

Restaurants cheap in America? Surely you're kidding, unless you include McDonald's as "restaurant". In my experience, the restaurants in California are twice or more more expensive than France or Italy (especially if you include all costs -tax, mandatory 20% tip) and on average worse quality, so it's not like they compensate for the price with better quality.

Even McDonald's and other fast food is extremely expensive compared to the cost of other goods in society. I would love a deep-dive on why eating out is so expensive in the US.

My point of reference is traveling through Germany recently and realizing that I could have a sit-down meal in an amazing cafe in Munich for less than a meal at Panera (which is like McDonald's for sandwiches except they charge more because they use more wood in the decor and more words in the food descriptions). And the waiter in Germany doesn't suggest a 25% tip, unlike the self-serve computer terminals at Panera.

Food is cheap in the US as compared to any modern nation, especially on a PPP basis - both groceries and restaurants. Particularly McDonalds.

Restaurants are absolutely cheaper in America than in most places.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings...

Food is labour intensive, labour is expensive in Europe.

You know that chart is wrong the second you notice a single color for US

I'd be content with resuming generous profit sharing.

Back in the day, Walmart, Microsoft, Starbucks, many others, were pretty fucking terrific with their employee stock grant programs.

I don't know how or why that generosity stopped. But if corporations (specifically, their exec team and board of directors) had continued to share the wealth, we wouldn't now be seriously considering radical cashectomies.

> 1/2 the undocumented workers would be out of a job

Unemployment is bad for unemployed, bad for people around unemployed and bad for the overall economy.

"Increase the minimum wage" recommendation is bad.

>you can live extremely well compared to anyone in 1970 just off Walmart.

Except those aren't the major costs that end up hitting you. It's true that laptops and motorcycles are cheaper and better than ever, but healthcare, rent, and taxes are what will make you bankrupt.

Some people would argue it's government regulation and bureaucracy that drives those astronomic.

https://www.valuepenguin.com/average-household-budget

We keep coming back to exactly this and it has been explained over and over again and yet still, here we are. If you increase the minimum wage you’ve done nothing. Prices of goods are priced with the cost of the workers and everything else required to get it to the shelf. If you increase the cost of the workers in that chain you increase the cost of goods. So when you increase minimum wage you inflate, but their buying power remains the same.

> The US has 10-20M people 'off the books' working for crap wages, no health insurance. That is a huge part of why everything is so cheap in America.

You assume that middle class Americans are willing, available and able to do those jobs when paid higher wages and benefits. In my many years I have yet to find “Americans” doing roofing jobs for example.

This just depends on the area.

It seems a fair assumption - if nothing else, when those wages and benefits rise high enough anyone globally willing to do them could afford a decent immigration lawyer.

This 'Americans are too lazy' narrative is used as justification for suppressing wages below what previous generations of Americans had gotten enshrined in law as fair compensation for a certain level of risk and discomfort.

The lack of desirability of roofing jobs is not an excuse to abuse undocumented immigrants.

If you pay roofers enough and make the job site as safe as possible they’ll do the job. But these companies would prefer to get easy, subservient labor with minimal safety equipment who can’t complain because they’ll get deported.

Artificially underpaying entire industries by turning a blind eye to labor laws or making up industry-specific below market value rules (like agricultural migrant labor visa programs) isn’t really a solution to the problem, in my opinion.

If every undocumented roofer was given a social security card and permission to work, they’d wonder why they’re risking their life on a roof when they’d get better pay, benefits, job security, and guaranteed retirement driving a bus for the city.

> You assume that middle class Americans are willing, available and able to do those jobs when paid higher wages and benefits. In my many years I have yet to find “Americans” doing roofing jobs for example.

One would have to assume that eventually, when roofers are paid as much as those of us who are sitting here reading hackernews, there will be a steady stream of workers inclined to fill these positions. I feel like this is the sort of textbook example taught in Econ 101, and if the "free market" can't even solve even this sort of basic problem without a serf class of undocumented immigrants, it would imply that American-style capitalism itself is a failed experiment.

Do we really want to live in a society where putting a roof over someone's head is valued more than optimizing ad placement?

Do you really want to live in a society where optimizing billions of ads is valued 10,000 times more than saving lives in an ER ?

If you don't think Americans are doing roofing, you must live in a strange place. The biggest roofing company in my state, Salazar roofing, is American owned and operated. The guy who roofed my house is a 60 year old teacher who roofs in the summer. And I don't mean he owns the business, I mean he owns the business and he's the primary guy doing the roofing, hiring kids wanting summer jobs to bring him shingles he puts down like some inhuman shingling robot, in pressed jeans and shirt.

"The biggest roofing company in my state, Salazar roofing, is American owned and operated." <--- This is a big part of what's happening.

Most people screaming about how 'Americans' won't do jobs like farming or construction will look at a company named Salazar and assume that Salazar uses undocumented labor. These people will also drive by construct sites, count the number of white workers, and use that as a proxy for how many Americans are working on that job.

There are plenty of construction companies that are still using undocumented laborers.

In 2015 when my grandparent's home was being torn down and rebuilt, our construction company used Peruvian and Portuguese undocumented labor, supervised by citizen foremen. We had to use our own electrical and plumbing to ensure it would pass city inspection (rather than have delays with corrections during intermediary visits) and complete on time.

Doubtful. Why? Because any under the table wages are taxed to the company or owner (if sole proprietor). Why pay your employees' taxes?

You're always paying your employees' taxes. Documented workers with social security numbers need employer-provided SS and Medicare taxes paid for their "over the table" wages. A company pays fewer of its employees' taxes for undocumented labor.

Undocumented labor doesn't pay income taxes. So the money is actually taxed in the company.

The net taxes paid is lower if an employer can avoid paying social security and Medicare taxes. Taxes on corporate income are lower (especially if the corporation can find a way to route that money to capital expenditure).

20% to 30% of an employee's income is straight up income tax paid out of the employee's income. If the employee is under the table, the employee's income is lumped in the employer's for taxable purposes. Social Security and Medicare taxes are maybe 1-2%. Look on any pay stub.

The employer still keeps more money, even if they're paying more in taxes. The employer may end up paying 20% of their income out in taxes, but they keep the other 80%; they're still out 100% of the money they pay to the employee, and if the under-the-table employee costs less than the over-the-table employee, they keep more money at the end of the day. Who cares if you're paying more tax if you have more cash?

And that's before we factor in that the over-the-table employee also costs SS, Medicare, unemployment insurance, overhead costs to administer all this because they clearly don't only have one employee, the list goes on.

I've known various Americans (as in born here) who did roofing. Now, what does "middle class" mean? Four-year degree from Michigan State?

>In my many years I have yet to find “Americans” doing roofing jobs for example.

Landscaping, too.

I never understood this from an economic perspective. The USA has rules in place for hiring non-citizens to come the country and fill jobs in landscaping. There are X slots a year.

Locally, the landscaping companies were complaining they couldn't do the work without those slots since they couldn't find workers due to the administration cutting the available non-citizen slots. They would come on the radio, complain to a host about hiring college kids to work, but they would leave after a few days.

The landscaping companies weren't raising the wage paid to attract and keep the people who would stay, though. They did raise the wage slightly, but not enough to move the needle.

Shouldn't the wage raise until you attract those people willing to do the work and stay? In turn, the cost of landscaping would rise to the customers.

> I never understood this from an economic perspective. The USA has rules in place for hiring non-citizens to come the country and fill jobs in landscaping. There are X slots a year.

"X" is effectively zero. A few people get in legally via refugee status or family relationships, but in practice the number of green cards issued is a tiny, tiny fraction the number of jobs that are actually done by immigrant workers.

And it seems like covid isn't adjusting this much. Newly-unemployed legal workers are not rushing into fill gaps in, say, farm worker employment that were previously held by undocumented people. The "Americans won't do these jobs" theory seems to be holding.

Why would they? The wages are shit and the living conditions are terrible. It’s way worse than working on the oil rigs but the pay is like 1/4. Of course legal workers arent running towards these jobs. Like literally any other job will pay better and cause less damage to you body and health.

If farm workers payed fair wages and provided good living conditions and proper safety and ergonomic tools then sure more workers work be citizens but the disconnect is so large farms would have to double or triple wage costs so it’s easy to claim that they raised wages a buck or 2 and there were still no takers.

> Shouldn't the wage raise until you attract those people willing to do the work and stay? In turn, the cost of landscaping would rise to the customers.

Utterances like "Americans won't take these jobs," "We can't find people for this req," are incomplete. The complete characterization is "Americans won't take these job FOR THIS PAY." I did think that for a time, that if everyone was willing to pay a premium for, say, landscaping service, any kind of service really, the premium would pay for the value-added, and the entire industry would slowly be pulled up. I was willing to pay a premium for landscaping, to a company that paid good wages, that hired ethically, and purportedly did excellent work. I paid the premium and got shitty service all the same. This has happened so frequently (tried to be a conscientious consumer, paid the premium, got shitty work that engendered more work for me to fix) it eroded this thinking in me. How do I adequately price X when X+premium still gets me substandard X? The safe action is to default to market price, and the gig economy wage is sliding downward. I don't know how I can individually influence this.

I’ve meet lots of American roofers in the Deep South and the mountain west. Roofing pays more than the average construction position because of the risks involved and many Americans choose it. It’s also fairly easy to start a roofing company, so it attract a certain kind of entrepreneur.

Well I said 1/2 of those jobs would be gone. Or that's what I implied.

Most of them would be relocated. And Americans will definitely work in restaurants, they do everywhere else. Somehow all of Europe and Canada manage to have crops as well - granted - there may need to be migrant worker program for harvest, but that would be reasonable actually, if it were done legally.

Consumer prices would rise no doubt.

> I rarely go to Walmart, but every few years I do in the USA, and it constantly blows my mind. The quantity, price and quality of 'stuff' in there ... you can live extremely well compared to anyone in 1970 just off Walmart.

Of course the companies making all this stuff and owning the retail chains were paying lower and lower wages, so they had to decrease the prices of goods through globalization to remain profitable and pay their C-suites ever increasing returns. That and soak people with usurious credit lines.

Also, I doubt the nice, $400 flat screen TV is going to help much in paying your medical bills or keep you from getting evicted when the pandemic affects your health or your job. The broad, material circumstances of working people have little to do with whether they can own a cheap, good quality blender, but instead their overall tenuousness. There’s little in this regard that indicates that people are better off than in the 1970s.