Over 90% of US Population Growth Since 2020 Came from Hispanics
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Really the big issue is lack of housing production, which was significantly lower in the 2010s and we still have not made up for all that lost time: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST
Rising productivity yields rising inequality. The issue is that land rents rise to swallow all productivity gains (we end up calling this "cost of living," as if it emerges out of the ether).
That's why in ultra-high productivity locales like Palo Alto, $200k/yr is a welfare wage. The land is ludicrously expensive because those prices rise in lockstep with productivity -- which they don't have to. Land costs nothing to exist. It is there ready to be used no matter what the price is.
But everything on the land, which is everything, must then pay rent to the landowners, giving rise to "cost of living."
You can disprove this by showing me a location with high productive power and low land prices, or a location with low productive power and very high land costs (that's not abandoned or a vacation spot for highly productive people).
"It's too expensive, no one lives there anymore"?
Based on the news I’ve been following, a more likely explanation is that Biden’s immigration policy has been more welcoming on the southern border at the same time as Latin America destabilizing quite a bit politically and generating a lot of refugee migration.
I just don’t see how high COL or lack of housing being built explains the population growth being dominated by Hispanics.
As for an explanation regarding the parent comment: Their use of the word "luxury" in this context antagonizes people by implying their standards are too high or they're spoiled or whatever, when really it's a perfectly reasonable thing to prioritize - and a perfectly reasonable thing not to prioritize. I.e. they have introduced team A vs team B negativity where it doesn't need to exist.
It's fine to prioritize individual bedrooms if that's important to them for some reason, but it's important to keep a realistic view of things, too. When things become common, then people sometimes forget that the less expensive option is totally acceptable, and means fewer years spent needing to work, more financial freedom, lower financial stress, etc.
If there’s contrary research showing housing prices specifically lead to emigration I’d love to learn more. It’s not representative of any narratives I’ve heard in media or in my personal life.
I could see how a higher COL and needing to work crazy hours is seeing more families delay children and/or having fewer children. But that’s a little more general than “expensive housing” and not something I’ve heard as even a thing for America expats, except those nearing retirement age. So maybe it could be Boomers choosing to retire abroad which could explain it but I haven’t seen this en masse in enough ways to make me believe it could be realistic.
Has building more housing crossed your mind?
Importing masses of unskilled labor puts downward pressure on wages. This is basic supply and demand.
Citation needed
> They’re just not willing to work for pennies
What jobs pay pennies?
> This is basic supply and demand
In a universe where more people in the country doesn't also increase demand, sure. That's not the universe we live in though.
“Pays Pennies” is a common English phrase that means “a job that doesn’t pay well”. I.e. jobs they pay at or slightly above the minimum wage.
Why should native workers be displaced by those seeking asylum simply because the people seeking asylum are willing to work at OR BELOW minimum wage? I sympathize with their plight but to pretend that many of them aren’t economic migrants vs those who are actually fleeing imminent danger seems naive.
And before the argument is made: I absolutely support crippling fines for those employers who KNOWINGLY hire under the table to skirt minimum wage laws.
https://www.epi.org/blog/immigrants-are-not-hurting-u-s-born...
>>1) The unemployment rate for U.S.-born workers is the lowest rate on record ( 3.6% )
>>2) The rate of U.S.-born individuals aged 25–54 with a job is at its highest rate in more than two decades
>>3) Immigrants only make up 18.6% of the labor force.
By any metric you look at , it become obviously clear that immigration is not causing high unemployment among U.S.-born workers.
The people coming over the border are doing so to escape poverty and harsh conditions from their respective country. I don’t think telling them to go buy a new house is gonna work at current US prices, and if you want the government to provide these new houses, then you really need to consider what the effect would be on inflation housing 9 million people at the current housing market would be.
The US has a dry foot policy specifically for Cuba, encouraging people to seek asylum in the US.
The US involvement in Central America - from Honduras in 2009 and before that encouraged migration and asylum servers, but that bell is hard to unring.
The number of asylum seekers is a tiny proportion of overall immigration of all types so we can basically ignore it.
Population vs housing imbalance in California is not driven by immigrants anyway. The bulk of those people are citizens born to citizens or green card holders. Even if you could stop illegal immigration and simultaneously remove all non-citizens and non-visa holders right now today... that only punts the problem down the road by less than a decade.
You don’t think that many people coming into the country has an impact on housing and rent prices?
too late to edit now but other than the butchered sentence I meant the cost of rent is higher than the pre tax salary.
One of the biggest problems with meme-driven economics like this (and HN is ground zero for this kind of logic) is the extent to which people just don't cite numbers anymore.
There is some truth here: property values in high-income US cities are growing faster than incomes. And that's a problem, and worth discussing. But that discussion can't happen until people stop with the hyperbole. And needless to say, without discussion there can be no solution. (Which, after all, serves the evolutionary goal of the meme!)
[1] Which surely reflects an average occupancy of 1.5-2 people, so needs to be adjusted even farther downward.
So what’s the meme data here? are you disputing the rent to income ratio statistics? because you’re quoting them here. Are you claiming that a 1:2 rent to income ratio in a high cost of living state is actually fine? because that could be a legitimate meme on its own.
It... is. You said it had a certain value. I disputed that and gave numbers.
> Are you claiming that a 1:2 rent to income ratio in a high cost of living state is actually fine?
No, I'm claiming it's not 1:1, which is what you said the first time. Also that it's not outrageously out of scale with the rest of the country (which pays less rent but makes significantly less) or historical data (housing used to be cheaper, but only by about 30% over 50 years or thereabouts).
The "meme" is basically that The Economy Is Terrible And We Are Going To Hell In A Handbasket. And that's wrong. Something are more expensive, housing among them. Other things (travel, entertainment) are much cheaper. And as those tradeoffs change (slowly) the demographic distributions change (slowly). There's nothing new here, this is how things have always worked.
Your great great grandparents moved west in caravans for precisely the same reason: real estate was cheaper in the frontier!
You're being pretty dishonest in your replies here. I said multiple times throughout this thread that this trend is across the country. I used LA as a specific example. 1:2 is still bad. It's not really disputable that this is not a sustainable or liveable situation.
> Other things (travel, entertainment) are much cheaper
Good thing those are the things people need to live? You think someone paying $3k a month rent making $50k is super concerned about travel prices? You sound extraordinarily privileged and out of touch and I see nothing to be gained from continuing this conversation.
>Your great great grandparents moved west in caravans for precisely the same reason: real estate was cheaper in the frontier!
My great great grandparents were slaves or the children of slaves - and what a strange analogy. There is no "frontier" now and the government subsidized those moves and stole the land from the natives. You're wildly out of touch and uninformed.
Not but those are the sort of things people who say stuff like this need to you to purchase to keep you complaisant
All I'm doing is responding to your (incorrect) numerical assertions. I really don't see how that can be "dishonest". If you don't like the direction of the conversation, I strongly recommend you counter with numbers of your own showing where the problem you think you see lies. That's how we get to a policy discussion on which we can agree. All you're doing right now is shouting at me because I don't see the same reality you do. Let's discuss the reality, no?
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/census-shows-americas-pos...
What I wonder is if they've accounted for the lobbying of various subgroups to leave the "white" category, such as Hispanics themselves did in the late 60s - early 70s (speaking Spanish is neither a race nor a single culture.)
Every time a former white person declares themselves Latino (or MENA for that matter), the ratio changes.
Hispanics will become "white," as will Asians (East Asians and Desis). The story of America will continue to be blacks getting left behind, and we'll continue to argue about what to do about it.
Racism do not have any internal consistency, that's why I heavily judge the intelligence of those subscribing to it. Indians were 'black' until weren't in my country.
Contrast that with Europe, where whiteness is a very strict category. This could partially explain the unrest that's going on in the UK. I saw a group of X users arguing with a British citizen with an Italian surname. They claimed that he was not really English (really what they were implying was, he wasn't white), even though his passport said so. I found it strange, because in the States we often consider Italian Americans to be white.
That’s a broad generalization about what people believe.
This is misleading, because it's not tracked like this on the US census. Hispanic is a separate question from race - people are "White Hispanic" or "Black Hispanic" or "(something) Hispanic", not just "Hispanic".
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/census-shows-americas-pos...
It's definitely eliding a lot of the nuance of the article, but technically it's not wrong.
Yes, it's still substantially higher than other ethnic groups, but not by as much as it used to be.
The wealthier you are, the more financial sense it makes to have zero children. Until the government decides that subsidizing families is worth doing until the population pyramid is stabilized, every wealthy subgroup will experience decline (except the practicing religious subgroups of those).