The Fruits of Immigration
marginalrevolution.com
marginalrevolution.com
Many Americans take the stance that "I'm not anti-immigration, I'm anti-illegal-immigration." Nevertheless, the US has very restrictive citizenship & green card programs, and the quotas are a fraction of the demand for them. If we were pro-immigration, we would increase these quotes.
As a globalist: the people living south of our border are just as deserving of a livelihood as we are. This is also the reason that I don't go out of my way to buy local food-- the Chileans need it more than my fellow American farmers. (The American-born farmers had all the opportunities in the world to learn other skills, but they did not excel in high school and have consistently been using protectionism and the "buy local" meme to boost their business.)
There is a large spectrum of scaryness out there. child labor making bags is better than ... the alternative.
Sometimes, child labor is the alternative to human trafficking.
That's one of the fundamental issues with the entire topic - emotions ranked are above evidence based policy.
Strangely enough poor uneducated immigrants are easily net positive for society, and so are educated ones.
I recommend reading "The Economic Consequences of Immigration" for a good picture of the benefits and costs.
Second, a kid having to work in a factory is way way better than having to be a slave. Keep in mind, these kids would be working back on the farm with their family, but their family can't afford to feed them, so they send them off. Their families are usually lied to about what their kids are going to do. My western sensibilities find this awful.
So i'm a bit curious at this point. It seems you're advocating, since the kids can't have a perfect life, they might as well be raped?
I can say much the same about your options. Granted, child slavery is worse than child labor. However child labor is still not acceptable. And if a company like, say, Nike was to use that as an excuse for having their shoes made by child labor, I'd find that unacceptable.
...and specifically selected to be offensive.
Of course. That was the point. Your argument is of the form, "We should accept A because if we don't then some people will suffer B, which is much worse." I just substituted a different pair of A and B with a relationship that is just as clear as the relationship between the things that you were describing.
The logical form of the argument is unchanged. Yet your immediate response is that both are unacceptable.
For a lot of human history, we've had kids doing work. It's not great, and parents usually agree! One of the first things that families do, when they escape poverty, is to pull their kids out of jobs and put them in schools. And the money that the child earned can help a family feed themselves and be raised out of poverty. It's a negative feedback loop.
The part where I disagree with you is the notion that there's something xenophopic about feeling that current levels (depending on where you get your estimates, this ranges from about 1 to 1.8 million per year) are a reasonable limit. I do find it surprising that a nation that admits well over a million immigrants a year is so frequently accused of "anti-immigrant" policies because the annual cap isn't even higher.
You say you'd increase the quota, but you didn't mention if you'd eliminate it altogether. Suppose you felt that immigration levels should be double what they are now, say about 2.5 million a year. Does that mean someone who would make it 5 million a year can call you anti-immigrant?
I would, however, put in a quota based on the amount of education, capital, and whatever else would provide an estimate of the benefit that this immigrant would provide to the country, penalized by the difficulty that the person would have in integrating and establishing himself.
So, for example, someone with a doctorate, a job offer from an employer, significant capital, and fluency in the language should NEVER have an issue getting into the country.
Keep in mind, if I wrote a post arguing for a cap of 1.2 million a year, some people would upmod me because it's high, others would downmod be because it's too low, others would down mod me because it's too high, others would upmod me because it sets a firm limit. The number of strong opinions on this topic is bewildering (but not at all surprising).
I'm not completely sure how I feel about the issue, to be honest, but I'm an immigrant (my parents brought me when I was an infant), and I probably wouldn't have made it here under either the criteria that exist now nor the ones you are promoting.
What I know is that the dream of immigration to the US is about having a better life for you and your children. Don't the poor and uneducated deserve that dream just as much as anyone else?
Of course! The question is, how many poor and uneducated immigrants would you advocate naturalizing every year in the United States? 100K? 500k? 1.2 Mil? 4 mil? No limit? I feel that until people answer that question (and it will vary from person to person), there's no way to have a meaningful conversation about illegal immigration, which is about setting and enforcing limits.
As for "running out of land"... that's actually a little ambiguous. California could probably triple in population, and we'd still have some rural-ish areas in the extreme north. Japan, because of the density of its cities, actually preserved its rural character in some areas, and this is a country with a population density of 337.1/km2! In other ways, California has already "run out" of land. Ever drive from Orange county down to Tijuana? With the exception of a military base, it's basically sprawl all the way down. I suppose we could increase the coastal population by building high density housing on the coast...
Yes, but how do you prioritize? How do you control the drag on the social support systems of the country? How do you handle the gargantuan task of integrating these people into society?
I don't see a lot of Canadian PhDs smuggling themselves in to the US, compared to Mexican laborers. Because there isn't demand to support the risk. The US seems far more willing to pay for laborers than PhDs.
However, even if that wasn't the case, You wouldn't see Canadian PhDs smuggling themselves in because they can get perfectly good jobs outside of the country. They don't need to go anywhere illegally, because they have plenty of options to go elsewhere. If it wasn't for the TN visa, I would be working in Europe, Asia, Canada, or nearly anywhere else, because someone from there would be trying to attract me.
It's not that there's no demand to support the risk. There's plenty of demand. There's also enough demand elsewhere -- if I had trouble getting into the states, some other company would have me, and I would be contributing to the economy there.
And honestly I think that is one of America's greatest advantages. Reliance on credentialism ends up too often being just another class-based divide rather than meritocratic in any sense. Look at Andrew Carnegie, as an immigrant he had little to set him apart, but eventually he became one of the wealthiest men in the world. There are many, many more examples just like his. And yet so often we continue to say "yes, but, let's ignore that and pretend that we can filter people by merit". I don't agree that we can filter people by merit.
It makes sense to prioritize for the most productive/least diseased/least criminal/etc when possible to discriminate with reasonable certainty. Of course, this is not to imply that immigrants are neither unproductive, nor unhealthy, nor unlawful.
While rags-to-riches stories are great, riches-to-riches probably has a better expected outcome.
Keep in mind, Australia also has a very low population density, but you'd have trouble populating the interior.
New Zealand has a very low population density, and is essentially a large national park. Certainly they could up that population density of 16.4/km^2. Should New Zealand aim to increase its population five to ten fold over the next 50 years to catch up? Is New Zealand an "anti-immigrant" country for not allowing this kind of growth through immigration?
You can say "yes", but then you'd have a tough time identifying a country that isn't "anti-immigrant", and I think the US would come off as one of the more immigrant-friendly nations out there. Not the most so, but pretty high up on the list.
Yes. I do think the US is one of the more immigrant-friendly nations, but the numbers admitted can't be divorced from their context.
No immigrant is going to move into the middle of nowhere; they are going to move to cities or towns. People vs. total area is a misleading number.
In any case, this is a curious objection to raise in a thread about a story documenting the inability of rural farmers to hire a productive labor force following a change in the law. Quite a lot of immigrants work in the agricultural sector and live a good way away from major cities.
I know a lot of Americans who say exactly that, and none of them mean what you (or the parent poster) claim they mean. On the contrary, one of the most common statements I hear from them is "make it easier for people to immigrate legally".
In contrast, in 1907, the US population was around 87 million and there were about 1.3 million registered immigrants for about 1.4% growth through immigration--anywhere from two to four times the level today.
The Democrats have a standing policy of increasing the merit-based immigration. However, Republicans have always insisted that the illegal immigration be addressed as well in any such legislation...
An example, the state of Georgia wrote their own law on legal hires. Now, they are having difficulties retaining fruit pickers for the summer harvest.
I make it a point to not buy fruit from Chile, because I am voting with my taste buds that I want good fruit not cheap fruit.
My favorite fruit is the peach, and I wait for summer and farmer's markets so that I can get some ripe fruit (ever noticed how the supermarket peaches are usually unripe and never really ripen? they seem to go directly from unripe to rotten).
Maybe you live in North Dakota or some such remote place and Chilean fruit is all you get.
Anyway, just an excuse for me to sing the praises of California peaches. :)
as for transportation - america is a big country. i am not sure "local" californian peaches on the east coast will suffer much less than chilean peaches - in both cases, significant transport is necessary.
disclaimer: i live in chile.
And it's evident that the domestic labor force is ill-equipped to fulfill this demand.
So you are faced with two choices:
- A shrinking, or at least plateauing of your agriculture industry because you can't find enough people who can do the job.
- Letting in tax-paying workers in a legal manner to support your growing industries.
The third option is that some company will set up shop in some other country to exploit this labor force that is unavailable in your country, then sell you cheap-ass cucumbers and further increase your trade deficit, and the US government sees neither personal nor corporate income tax benefits, nor any of the ancillary benefits (increased local economy, increased demand for services from workers, etc etc) of having the work in the country.
Yes it's an option, although you and most countries are fairly far from it yet. It takes decisions, purpose and money.
If I can use you as a proxy for Mexico, whatever is not known about this by the larger Mexican economy, and engineering and agriculture communities, can be learned from the smaller groups of knowledgeable people and spread. It's a hard problem, and whatever technologies are developed can lead to exportable products and services (both engineering and agricultural).
Yes, you have big deserts next to the sea, and you probably want to keep them deserts, if for no other reason than human transformation of large ecologies sometimes doesn't work out. So advanced, Mexican developed hothouse technology, enabled by desalinated and pumped water, gives you a place for Mexicans to migrate to in-country, without having to smuggle themselves across the border to die in an American or Mexican desert.
All those Mexican citizens currently working for American agriculture, sending some money home but spending money in America for daily living, could instead be spending that money in Mexico. All that money earned would be feeding the Mexican economy, in addition to the national income earned from exporting agricultural products.
Imagine if the safest food that Americans (and Mexicans) eat came from rigorously clean and high technology Mexican hothouses.
Mexico does have a lot of oil, so part of those decisions could involve moving some of that oil from quick money exports to longer term desalination, little by little. It may not always be oil, maybe a good portion of the needed energy could come from tides, winds, chemical differentials between deep sea and shallow sea water. It could be Mexico's Moon project.
Put differently, a terrorist wants you to live in fear thinking he will kill you. A narco will just kill you and be done with it.
...at the current market price for manual farm work, which is low because there are plenty of people from other countries willing to work extremely hard for low pay. But think about the long-term effects here - eventually the current pickers are going to get old and retire. New ones will be needed. So now we need to import more uneducated manual laborers into the country. At the current rates at which 2nd-, 3rd-, and 4th-generation Hispanic immigrants graduate college (http://www.hispanic7.com/us_latinos_enroll_in_college_more.h...), you're literally importing an underclass that is ethnically, culturally, and linguistically different from the majority. That never ends well.
> The third option is that some company will set up shop in some other country to exploit this labor force that is unavailable in your country, then sell you cheap-ass cucumbers and further increase your trade deficit
This can be handled with tariffs, like we do with sugar.
Welcome to the history of the United States. This isn't just manual laborers, but applies to skilled/educated labor forces too. The intellectual side of America has always been driven by immigration, and this has never been more true than the post-WW2 era. Look at your local university's academics - how many them are first-generation or second-gen immigrants? NASA is practically built out of foreign scientists. And closer to home, what's the representation of immigrants in the tech industry compared to the population at large?
The locals always underperform compared to people willing to scrabble and fight because they've had a tougher background. So unless you have a plan to make locals competitive (beyond simply "raise the wages!"), this seems an inevitable move.
> "This can be handled with tariffs, like we do with sugar."
Ah, so you hope to fight free market capitalism with tariffs... Okay, so let's go with your plan and raise manual labor wages such that people actually want to be farm hands.
Then we go way out of our way to essentially ban foreign imports, or make them so expensive that everyone must use domestic substitutes. We become an enclosed economy so we don't have to face competitive pressures from outside. You're an economy in a bottle, and you better damn pray you have everything you could ever want within your own borders... because as soon as you leave more competitive countries will eat you for lunch.
What part of that sounds like sound economic policy?
> "you're literally importing an underclass that is ethnically, culturally, and linguistically different from the majority. That never ends well."
Isn't this the crux of your argument? You seem to believe this is a bad thing - I fail to see how this can be the case. If this country eventually just starts speaking Spanish as a first-language, what's wrong with that? So what if burritos eventually replace hamburgers as the national staple... in fact this has already happened in some places to no ill effect.
I used to live in Toronto, Canada, where a whopping 50% of the population is immigrant. Pandemonium has not ensued, and instead the country is a stronger, more interesting, and more diverse place for it. Xenophobia has no place in modern economic policy.
Even looking beyond principles of equality, protectionist laws are just plain bad ideas because you're only staving off the inevitable and making things worse. If there is a coder out there right now who's better than me, wants 10% of my pay, and is willing to bust his ass to do so... come hell or high water there's not a force in the world sufficient to stop him from competing with me.
They are only coming, because they earn even less in their old country. Why do you want to keep those people poor?
Prices are low partly because they have no bargaining power due to their lack of legal status. It is the threat of deportation and the resultant economic insecurity that keeps such people in an 'underclass' and prevents them from participating more fully in society, even if they are paying taxes or otherwise invested.
Tariffs have been repeatedly demonstrated to be a failure, as has economic autarky in general.
So I propose the following: for every agricultural job that goes unfilled, we kick one American off unemployment/welfare and inform them that a job has been found for them.
If the job continues to go unfilled, we kick another American off unemployment/welfare. We repeat this process until either a) all agricultural jobs are filled or b) there are no more unemployed people. If b) occurs, we can then reopen the discussion on immigration to fill agricultural jobs.
1: http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2011-06-25-pro... 2: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/illegal-...
Georgia has 11k unfilled agricultural jobs. At the rates described in the article (American workers quit after 1 day), we could reduce the unemployment rolls in Georgia by 11k people/day (330k/month). For comparison, Georgia had only 54k new unemployment claims in May.
http://www.dol.state.ga.us/pdf/pr/initialuiclaims.pdf
This would result in a net decrease of 280k people from the unemployment rolls per month, for Georgia alone.
That's the beauty of my plan - it is guaranteed to solve one of two problems (unfilled agriculture jobs or unemployment). We can't determine beforehand which problem it will solve, but it has to solve at least one.
The problem is, when you try to force people into work by cutting their welfare that they received for so long without effort is that your carrot is just a worn out version of the one they were getting and the rest of your incentive is all stick. I spent most of my time in that job looking for grown men hiding in bushes, on roofs, and anywhere else they could sneak off to and sending them back to work. Trying to change behaviours overnight is a waste of everyone's time and money and ideas like yours cost more money to implement than they save.
Some simple accounting:
Days 1-3: lazy bum is employed by your company and accomplishes nothing.
Day 4: you fire them for laziness.
Day 5: the government compensates you for their wages plus a premium for the wasted supervisor's time, risk, etc.
Day 6-week 99: the government does not pay unemployment benefits to the lazy bum.
Provided 99 weeks of unemployment costs more than 3 days wages + supervisory premiums, I can't see how this could fail to save money.
The scheme I worked for was an attempt to rehabilitate the long term unemployed and attempt to train them in a marketable skill. In my view, it was a failure for 95% of people there but it taught me a lot about managing difficult people. Note that I wasn't sent to work there, I worked for an employment company that managed the implementation of the government's idea.
The present education, family, societal and financial system is creating people who have no practical skills, no motivation to work and very little prospects. You have to deal with them as a nation somehow. Doing nothing will lead to social unrest, crime, bankruptcy and a whole swathe of other issues. Giving them money for nothing just creates deadweight dragging down the rest of the economy and basically gives them a life of subsistence poverty. Solving this issue is not easy. Get to work or suffer is a bad solution because suffering isn't limited to the individual, it is inflicted on those closest to them and the rest of us too.
This stuff starts with education. You cannot expect to be a service economy if your K-12 education fails a decent percentage of society. Luckily the tools are becoming available to help, and we need students, teachers and schools to take advantage.
They merely preferred hiding in the bushes to doing actual work. This was the same situation Georgia had when they tried to get probationers to work the fields - they were capable of working, but unwilling.
This is the group of people to whom I applied the term "lazy bum". Under my proposal, no one has to live on the streets. The only option which is eliminated is the "be lazy, force workers to pay for your leisure" option.
There are so many safety nets in this country that people have a viable choice of doing nothing instead of going out in the field and working hard. None of the parolees even lasted until noon.
When I was 15, I picked sweet corn for my neighbor. It was terribly hard work, but it was my only option to earn money (for a car). The next summer I was able to drive to get a better job. Its all about options and motivation.
Yeah, generally, committing crimes doesn't say much for someone's ability to defer gratification, which is essentially what hard work is.
There are a number of problems with that.
First, tomato mechanization had been researched for what looks like a couple of decades before Bocero ended. It was a solution in search of a problem, then the problem came. So not all fruits yet have suitable mechanical harvesting mechanisms.
Secondly, in order to use mechanical harvesting (with today's equipment anyway), you have to actually plant differently! Wider, longer rows for example. Or different varieties. So farmers would need some time to prepare.
In the long run certainly it should be mechanized from an economic point of view.
From a technical point of view, someone on HN needs to hack a Kinect onto a robot and make an autonomous harvester that can work with multiple types of plants!
The people here on this visa, would be working for themselves, attempting to create jobs for Americans, and not taking away any jobs from them, so Congress, get your act together and pass this bill NOW!