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Comment by carom | Hacker News Reader

Flooding the country with millions of undocumented workers to compete with Americans is not a favor to the working class. That is a hand out to corporations.

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I can’t find any statistical reporting to back there being millions more undocumented immigrants coming into the country in the last 4 years. Data-backed reporting indicates that we’ve had ~11 million undocumented workers since the 2005 with little change until 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-k...

Any chance you know where to find some more?

Look at monthly border patrol contacts with people crossing the border illegally. About 55k/mo recently with much higher numbers in 2023.

It seems that most undocumented workers are doing jobs left unfilled by Americans, for example farm labor.

They’re unfilled because they don’t want to pay competitive wages.

I take no position on why these jobs are unfilled by Americans. But trying to claim these jobs are stolen or taken by undocumented workers (as implied by the comment to which I originally responded) is just wrong. If I assume you are correct (and it is in fact a quite plausible theory), I would allege the jobs are being stolen from American workers by the employers. Certainly the employers are relatively more profitable as a result of their shenanigans, if you are correct.

It's also a hand out to middle class, who cosume a lot of services provided by illegal imigrants (landscaping, renovation, cooking in restaurants etc.). The Dems kept the price of maintaining a nice lawn low.

Ah, yes, because all those people are working at Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft.

It's a handout to anyone buying those services and a loss to anyone selling them (trade workers).

Companies can't "just hire" illegal immigrants in most states - the majority of the ones Trump won.

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