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Comment by AshleighBasil | Hacker News Reader

>reported farms using illegal labor.

I'm from Mexico, but I've always suspected the reason the US Democratic Party supports immigration is precisely because a lot of big corporations want to drive down the price of labor. They piggyback on antiracist and antinationalist activism to advance the interests of big agriculture.

If I was a big agro, I'd invest in both parties. The Republicans to remove regulation that helps big agro compete, and the Democrats to implement regulation that prevents small agro from competing.

Although tbh this is all I know of American politics from reading internet threads, haha

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"If I was a big agro, I'd invest in both parties. The Republicans to remove regulation that helps big agro compete, and the Democrats to implement regulation that prevents small agro from competing."

They do.

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/cargill-inc/summary?id=D000...

It's not Democrats, it's business owners needing that labor. The Republicans are equally bad in practice, it's their rhetoric that is tougher.

> is precisely because a lot of big corporations want to drive down the price of labor

Doesn't immigration also create industry which then creates jobs?

Yes.

But, lowering tariffs also lets cheap chinese assembly line shoes be shipped to the US for 80 cents less than what it costs to manufacture on shore.

The 80 cents saved does not matter to the shoemaker who lived to sell shoes all his life, has 2 kids and a mortgage, and suffers early retirement due to unfetted globalization.

The obvious solution would be to give everyone jobs. Surely there is something to be gained from not letting unemployed people sit around doing nothing.

Immigrants can only increase demand that is less than the value of their wages. There is diminishing returns in adding more people to a situation.

Since immigrants are much poorer on average, they spend less than the native population, and often cost more in welfare etc. So the costs of immigration are borne by taxpayers and native low wage workers, while large corporations and business owners reap the benefits.

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