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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

"We have unfilled shit jobs so let's import poor people from other countries and force them to work in these shit jobs."

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Ahh yes, we should really stop sending trucks and grabbing people with a big cartoon net and dragging them here against their will to do menial jobs they would never choose to take of their own volition.

I'm criticizing your use of the words "import" and "force", because economic migrants are people and not things to be imported. There are also so many people desperate to come here to do literally any job that it's laughable to talk about them being coerced to do so. Have you ever talked to an economic migrant?

I can’t believe I’m about to use this stupid term, but this is such a “woke” take.

“My political bubble doesn’t think highly of this job, and so we shouldn’t give anyone the opportunity to do it.”

And yes, it IS an opportunity for some people. Just because you’re a dev that makes $150k/year doesn’t mean everyone can do that.

It may not be so far from the truth. As an example Canada has a temporary foreign worker program that has been abused by employers to keep wages low, work conditions abysmal, and threaten the workers with sending them back home to ensure compliance under these conditions.

The US, I believe, similarly uses its ample illegal labor supply in similar ways.

A similar argument can be made about the H1-B program. I don’t know if this is still the case, but a few years ago the stats on all H1-B visa-holders showed they were paid on average around $80K despite mostly being in technical roles at F500 companies. The stats are openly available from the relevant US gov website.

I don’t doubt that companies have abused H1-B as a means of spending less on specifically SWE talent.

I would wage a hefty sum the vast majority (>90%) are beyond thrilled to be coming to the US. They are willing and WANT to come. You make it sounds like they are being captured and transported on slave ships.

Given the choice most would rather go to Canada than the US, better worker rights, better social safety net and better health care. Further we need certain demographic, we need young workers -post school, that will work and pay into the system for the next 30-40 years. We don't want people we'll have to support, bringing in workers for Walmart where the first thing they do is move into subsidized housing and sing up for Medicaid and SNAP is not the type of immigration that will help this country.

Exactly. A vast majority of the world would love to be able to choose to be in a shit job without healthcare in the US - does that mean we should remove all wage protections and deny healthcare to anyone making less than $250k a year?

Do you happen to any stats to support that?

I took a quick look. Canada seems to accept around 430k legal immigrants and had another 30-40k illegal crossing in 2022.

The US seems to have admitted 1 million between July 2021 and July 2022 so lets say somewhere around 1 million legal immigrants were accepted in 2022. Illegal crossing were around 2.7 million for 2022.

I take a look at these numbers I scratch my head at your statement. The US has orders of magnitude more illegal crossings. In fact the US average for 1 month is 225k which is almost 6 times as high as the YEARLY average for Canada. The numbers are pretty clear about where they are going. Nothing is stopping those entering the US illegally from entering Canada illegally too. Yet I can't seem to find any numbers that support that idea that even a fraction of the ones entering the US want/try to go to Canada.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne...

https://irb.gc.ca/en/statistics/Pages/Irregular-border-cross...

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/12/net-internati....

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/migrant-border-...

I agree with this, but I wonder if the stats aren’t biased a bit because it probably is harder for someone from Central America to get to Canada than the US. I mean you have to go through the US to get to Canada.

It sounds like, objectively, Canada is a better place to be if you’re an illegal immigrant (if you don’t mind the weather).

Ya I would agree the stats are probably biased based on the US border vs Canada's.

However at the same time it would not be difficult to travel from the southern US border to the US-Canada border. I would wager its easier than making the journey from south america to the Mexico-US border.

But being a better place does not always equate to more people wanting to immigrate there. If it did we would see more people coming to countries like Canada than the US. I think part of the major appeal of the US is the basically open southern boarder and very lax immigration law/policies. You have entire states that advertise they flout federal law and are a sanctuary state. That has to be a major major appeal for someone considering an illegal crossing. Basically you get to one of those states or cities and your likelihood of being deported drops significantly.

I am not super familiar with Canada's policy or system but based purely on numbers it seem like they keep a much tighter control on the number coming in.

True. Getting to CA once you are in the US is probably the easier part of the overall journey.

You probably can't consider yourself "safe" (in the baseball sense) by merely being in the US, you have to get out of Texas or Florida (if that's where you landed).

It's no more than a greyhound ticket from anywhere in the US to Roxham Road.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/the-national-roxham-road-immi...

I don’t think anyone is proposing forcing anyone to work a shit job. I do think that working in food service compares favorably to working in subsistence farming, shipbreaking, or being unemployed with no job prospects.

Why not give people the chance to make that call for themselves? And what’s the alternative? If you automate it all away, they’re still going to be farming and breaking ships.

> And what’s the alternative?

Perhaps that office with 50 programmers paid $75/hour could stretch to paying their 2 cleaners $20/hour instead of $15/hour?

Sure. But you’re not going to make up the difference just by increasing wages. Unemployment is at 3.4%—there’s not some huge glut of unemployed people waiting in the wings to clean offices at $20 an hour.

> "there’s not some huge glut of unemployed people waiting in the wings to clean offices at $20 an hour."

16 - 18 year olds. They can do the job after school.

I guess I would rather my kids use that extra time for, I dunno, learning extracurriculars or rest. But sure. Now what about all of the retail, foodservice, manufacturing etc. jobs that can’t be done during after school hours?

Tongue in cheek there are a couple of options:

1) Businesses change their work hours to fit the school schedule.

2) Schools operate in shifts.

Third shift high school is the stuff of nightmares.

Teens don't want these jobs, and with sufficient family support, opt out instead.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/21/after-dropp...

Well sure, who does? I didn't want the job as a busboy the summer I turned 18. I had it because my parents made me.

I too worked as a busboy for a single day in my teens. My parents did not force me to get a job. I won't force my kids to when they're old enough. n=1

Hard work doesn't prepare you for success. Connections, opportunity, and wealth to fall back on do.

> "Hard work doesn't prepare you for success. Connections, opportunity, and wealth to fall back on do."

Hell yeah, I learned this the hard way. The child labor isn't for success, it's for spendin' money.

Wait but nobody doing that kind of work makes anywhere near $20/hour. Retail store managers are still trying to get that.

No one is forcing anyone to do anything in that situation so i really don’t see how your comment makes sense.

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