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Comment by dcow | Hacker News Reader

I find the idea the only immigrants can do low skill labor kinda… obtuse. Maybe Americans should pick their own crops instead of living in a delusion that certain labor is beneath them. Boomer era “all my kids are going to get white collar jobs” type thinking isn’t sustainable.

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It's not beneath them per se. It's just that this trade only makes sense for a certain slice of the population at a certain time in their life. The immigrant is willing to work in that job because what is offered is not just the salary but something more (chance to immigrate, stability, arbitrage, etc.). It's similar to research assistants or grad students in universities. They are doing cutting edge research for peanuts because what they are getting is something more (degree, skills, future earning potential). It's hard to replace this dynamic. Or in other words, the dollar value of the intangibles is so high that if you were to put a price on it, it would make your business unviable.

> research assistants or grad students in universities

These are not fully trained scientists, but rather trainees. As such, they don't get paid the same as a fully trained scientist. Like how a journeyman is paid more than an apprentice electrician.

Of course, they are also underpaid, too. Ask any grad student union.

> It's hard to replace this dynamic. Or in other words, the dollar value of the intangibles is so high that if you were to put a price on it, it would make your business unviable.

Yes, it's very hard to pay your workers a liveable wage if everyone else is exploiting their workers by underpaying them.

All you're saying is that we've built exploiting labor (foreigners, interns, trainees) into our economy.

You should ask them if they feel if they're being exploited. Or ask startup employees if they are exploited for working at below market pay for equity. As someone who has been in each of these positions at different times, I can tell you that I never felt exploited.

I’d only say change the system to provide a pathway to residency. If you’re willing to work 12 hour days to ensure my fat American born self keeps eating , you deserve a spot here.

One of my former partners was making around 200k. Her grandparents cleaned homes.

The idea is that you come here and your life is crappy low paid work, but your kids and their kids have amazing careers.

I agree with the spirit of your comment. But what often gets overlooked is that we do have a pathway to permanent residency and naturalization. It involves demonstrating that you are willing and able to be a citizen, not just do labor. The fact that a large number of actual citizens probably aren’t equipped to perform their civic duties doesn’t excuse it. We can change the laws on what it takes to be a citizen but if it were easy to redefine citizenship I’d imagine we’d have already done it.

While I understand that you think this is romantic and ethical, it also guarantees a status quo where the economy and indeed everyone's quality of life is kept afloat by a permanent imported labor underclass. As we are finding out, we end up with colossal amounts of undertrained, entitled citizens and artificially deflated prices for critical civilizational services.

That’s where we’re at.

I’d just prefer to grant every worker the dignity of permanent residency.

The bizarre dystopian system we have now lets your employer get you deported. Not just farm workers, a lot of food processing plants are manned by undocumented workers.

If everyone without status up and left tomorrow we’d all starve in 2 months.

The problem with granting every worker permanent residency is that they would then lose the impetus to perform the work they're so critical for at the low wage they currently take, and the prices of goods and services will rise just like it would if the immigrants were not granted permanent residency and the labor force was scrutinized and protected property. I would rather simply just stop using immigrant labor and go after exploitative companies. I realize this is politically infeasible under the current status quo, but to really solve the problem we should be jailing owners who use illegal labor, perform wage theft, etc.

We also need to end the practice of holding workers to few enough hours that they require supplemental government welfare to thrive, for example the fraction of Walmart workers on food stamps, or who want full-time for benefits but can't get it.

Yet here we are. They even recognized officially (Labor Department, October '25) that Americans are not willing to pick up these jobs.

The laws of supply and demand apply to labour as well.

Don't worry, supply is there. Because the US is actually increasing visa caps for some of these workers. Might also be because they work at the properties of a certain person.

Need to keep those wages down, it would be terrible for profitability if he had to hire Americans you know!

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2025/06/12/trump-or...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/30/us/politics/h2b-visas.htm...

Immigrants aren’t the only ones who can do low skill labor, machines can do it too.

But doing any kind of labor that a machine can do, is beneath your capacity as a human, so you shouldn’t do that job, you should do other jobs that require human effort or where the quality of human output is valued.

Even if machines could do it, it doesn’t mean they could do it at or below the equivalent cost.

I also disagree with the automation point regarding what humans should do. As we see with current AI, many creative tasks can be automated but it doesn’t make them unfulfilling human endeavors.

The idea that humans are only worth anything because they're cheaper than machines is a devastating, dehumanizing take.

I think that depends on your perspective of work, and what constitutes value of work.

Do you think all jobs of equal moral value? I think most people feel that some work is more "humanizing" than others

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