> The real culprit is the backward immigration system designed to pacify voters.
Shouldn’t any immigration system actualize the will of the voters?
Shouldn’t any immigration system actualize the will of the voters?
The reality is that without immigration, this work will just shift to India, full stop. Visa sponsorship is a plum that benefits the outsourcer in their recruitment.
The current system very much benefits the US. Work visa holders pay taxes, support the local economy, and navigate a difficult journey to a green card and citizenship.
When you let populists rile up “the voters”, you get what’s happened in agriculture. Long standing seasonal migration get harder, and the farming moves to Mexico. We let the packinghouse unions get busted, and now there’s an environmental disaster in feed lots and rural facilities.
And they take jobs from locals, and increase the labor supply which can decrease wages. More people also exacerbates an undersupplied housing market. There are pros and cons to immigration. But yes, let’s just dismiss the concerns of those rubes and force them to do what you want.
Considering the percentage of immigrants/foreigners in Silicon Valley, it can be easily argued that its success was entirely due to the ease of foreign workers being able to work in the same location. If it was somewhere else that was more attractive, then who knows, Hong Kong could have been the alternate world Silicon Valley.
Such an underrated point. The workers aren't independent farmowners. They're low-paid employees of massive corporate farms that own that land. We utilize an incredibly small fraction of our land capable of growing crops and we use excess as a diplomatic tool for US hegemony. I just don't understand this distaste for immigrants. Let them in and we're all better off. They even pay into SS and never pull out a dime and all they get is pseudopatriots at the wall cosplaying and directing hate towards them, despite allowing them in being a net benefit to all of us.
Indeed, it’s not clear to me how these foreign workers are benefitting local economies. Profits from tech companies seem to be accruing to the elites. If you take a middle class California family from 1980, are they and their kids better off due to the immigration-fueled rise of Silicon Valley? Or did all the profits go to the elites and tech salaries just force the kids to move away from their family to Tennessee or Texas?
Their million dollar houses would suggest so. They can cash out and move to Tennessee or Texas as you point out.
Is this not the problem that needs to be addressed. Looks like the rich and media have successfully made a scapegoat out of immigrants when the actual problem is the money accuring to the elites and government inefficieny in improving housing supply.
Even in terms of voting power—immigration reduces social solidarity and undermines the economic left in the long run.