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How immigration remade the U.S. labor force (wsj.com)
33 points by coolanymous 66 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 161 comments



> Immigration has lifted U.S. population growth to almost 1.2% a year, the highest since the early 1990s. Without it, the U.S. population would be growing 0.2% a year

Population growth is always announced as a great thing but is this really the case ? For instance, house price are increasing because more and more people wants it, it also prevent salary from increasing because there are always people without job looking take the poorest offer.

It's great for the country economy and the government but it's never good for it's population.


Your argument is in the wrong direction: enforcing a liveable federal minimum wage ensures that there's a reasonable bottom to how low you can bid on labour. The housing crisis, on the other hand, is a net supply restriction effect caused by real estate speculation and investment, rather than it being a commodity (it never will be a commodity, but I'd wager there's a real estate bubble pop coming soon)


At the end of the day the Earth's resources are very much finite. We simply can't have indefinite growth, so it doesn't make sense to use it as a metric.


> finite

Sure, everything is finite, but 8 billion is too little. Earth can fit 8 trillion and more, all we need is more science.


That's a very optimistic way to think. But every new technology brings its set of failure and danger.

For instance energy: petrol -> pollution, nuclear energy-> tchernobil, danger currently in Ukraine with the war, ...

Food : fertilizer -> water pollution and eutrophication

Housing: more home -> less free soil to retain water, insane flooding.

And so on, and so on.

Anyway by the time we reach 8 trillion, a nuclear war surely would have already started and wiped us all


> set of failure and danger

Then what you need is moar science. 10x, 100x, 999999


science is very much limited by human ability to not regress to violence when limited when h^n meets the l*r there be carnage without modifications .


all we need is more science.. and religion


Maybe, but what's the point ? If science improves shouldn't we aim for less population?

Less people can keep up with more production. Less people means less impact on the environment. Less people means more nature. At least personally I rather have less people on the planet at any given moment.


why production? environmental? nature? Who cares about these things more than caring about humans [and happiness thereof]?

Sure I want less people and more earth to myself too, but if everyone [overall] wants as many free kids as they can afford, how on earth are you going to end up with having less people?

A girl's maximum happiness is directly correlated with the number of children she has. regardless of how much free capital and brainwashing received


> A girl's maximum happiness is directly correlated with the number of children she has. regardless of how much free capital and brainwashing received

Wow that's one interesting statement. I've met many girls that rather not have any kids AT ALL. Are those statistical anomalies or something? Are you implying that being pregnant 100% of the time = ultimate happiness?


Since when did she rather be childless? At birth? (Although girls are notorious at lying to themselves, wouldn't hurt to ask.)

Verily I say thee, it started when she realized how the world outside eden works. Scarcity, money, capitalism, food bills, rent bills, hospital bills, nanny bills, university bills, oh my, if you have as many kids as you want when will you have the time to yourself to ever rest and drink some water?

But you can go to this girl who ''rather not have any kids at all'' and see for yourself that's not true. All you need is to bring along $100 bill printouts equal to fortune-ten market cap to match, or buy them from Iran if she is the numismatic type. Go ask her if you have all this money in the world do you want kids? Then before she replies, flush out the cash and say It's all yours! Not if! Not when! You are Naow a trillionaire! It's all yours! Do you want kids?!

Yepp, now you're seeing. Let me know how many kids she wants. (Certainly it'll be age dependant, with those nearing menopause being sourgraped.)

With replacement rate decreasing from 2.1, even if she is the oddball type that wants only two kids, as long as for every billion of her there's someone who wants more, then we are all set. on the path to 8 trillion and more.

Of course if all else fails, don't say I didn't warn you, that this being earth not eden there will be folks who are actually mental and within a mere dozen-decade uncurable.

Being pregnant is not the point, like how working out is not the point. (These are costs not results.) While it can be negative, it's small compared to its epic takeaway.


Enforcing ubi ensures that there's a reasonable bottom to how low you can bid on labour.

Enforcing minimum wage however is problematic because it is an artificial level. It simply further creates two classes of people, the hired and the unhired.


Enforcing an understanfing of economics, motivation and thinking beyond a first order effect usually ensures people understand why ubi os a bad idea....


There is more than enough science and tech capital for automation to allow ubi over a decade ago. Go ask larry page (cf bit.ly/3TiyI9r), but at the same time be careful who you talk to, for example if you get near Bill Gates he will start to brainwash you why medicine shouldn't be opensourced to africa like we did for code because La and Ti and Do Re Mi 10x-th order thinking.

But enforcing billionth-order thinking is not enough to learn basic raw psych and motivation. here put to you in simple words:

— As with every capital transfer 40 acres or otherwise, it is a bad idea if you are not on the receiving side, second-order thinking not actually needed.


copying Scandi is not a bad idea



How do all these people immigrate to the US? Is it all family-based? I work in technological field with many more opportunities in the US and have researched how to move there but it seems almost impossible. I know an American who applied for jobs in my country, got an offer and was over within a few months but that doesn't work the other way round.


You fly over and overstay your visa (indefinitely.) Neglecting any discussion of the legal ramifications, that is largely how it happens.


And then you have no legal standing, so you get paid far below market depressing everyone's wages, and in any dispute you get deported. The best thing for workers would be for there to be no such thing as an "illegal alien" - but xenophobia/racism wins instead.


Yes, it's mostly family-based. If you look at the distribution of the categories of the issued green cards, ~2/3 are through family. Employment based green cards are less than 15%.


>Recent immigrants tend to earn less than U.S.-born workers because of their lower level of education, lack of English, and in some cases because they are working without permission. They might also compete with existing workers with less education and put downward pressure on their wages, too.

This is my biggest problem with immigration. It is a handout to corporations. If we think about the poorest Americans, this is doing them a massive disservice. Not that there is any shortage of jobs in tech, but you also have to wonder where the salaries would be at in tech, and how many more citizens would be training for these roles if it weren't for H-1B visa.

For the most part, America serves corporations through legislation and policy though. I dream of a country where the politicians serve the people and not companies, but I also have to wonder if the U.S. would be the economic power house that it is if things were different.


> "you also have to wonder where the salaries would be at in tech, and how many more citizens would be training for these roles if it weren't for H-1B visa"

On the flip side, you have to wonder where the American tech industry would be without immigrants.

Nvidia was founded by the son of Taiwanese parents who sent their children to live with an uncle in the US. That's one of the many immigration paths that the MAGAs want to close.

Was the creation of Nvidia a "handout to corporations"? Intel sure would be happy if Jensen Huang had never made it to America.


I don't disagree, getting smart and ambitious people to move to your country is a really good policy overall. It is just worth weighing it against the opportunity cost for the citizens of the country.


One thing I seldom see discussed is how if you're attracting the best and brightest it is leaving the original country poor. These places invest in their children hoping that they'll start businesses and then all that investment just ends up going to those countries that are already the richest.

I certainly don't blame anyone for wanting to move to improve their situation (I did it too!) but I wonder if developing countries would have caught up to the West decades ago if this brain drain wasn't going on.


What opportunity cost? Expensive healthcare? Expensive housing? Hey pal, why not everything else under the sun?

Immigrants have made the country rich enough to give everyone ubi free housing and free healthcare. But Then Billionaires.

#immigrants-are-the-new-jews #stop-blaming-the-hand-that-feeds

( Of course, it's not billionaires per se, but Greed. Eg in countries like singapore, the Politicians are the problem. )

For a living example, take a look at UAE, although I'd say they could have treated immigrants a bit better.


doesn't it beg the question though... if they're so good for America why aren't they good for their own country?


Because their country doesn't offer the same opportunities to achieve the things they believe they can in their new country. It's the main reason people emigrate. No one's going to build Nvidia in India or China, for instance, at least not back in the time that it was created in America.


America didn't used to be the country that offered those opportunities.

Yet people built it and made it that way.

Nothing is static people csn change anything

These people need to do that in their own countries.


Kind of ironic, considering the whole original population of America (the whole continent) was mostly replaced by immigrants, starting some time after 1492 AD.


well in that context they were conquerors


Colonizers rather than conquerors. Colonizers are effectively migrants, by the very definition of the word.


The British India Company colonisation of India was institutional colonisation.

The company remained for many generations but most (not all) individual British people stationed themselves in India and retired 'home' to England where to whence the money flowed.

Many European countries regarded their "colonies" as places to exploit for resources, places to be travelled to for work for many years, places they didn't regard as 'home'.

There's more to "colonisation" than just simple migration.

Even in Australia the early colonisation was by settler families that were part of larger stay at home families, the black sheep, wayward sons, and fortune seeking adventurers .. in Australia convicts and servant families remained, ultimately a good proportion of the underwritten (from home) settlers stayed .. but initially at least many heads of these families "returned home" to England.

In a similar manner modern USofA has many institutional "colonies" around the globe, bases they've established and never left, these rarely have permanently settled multi generational families.


and those countries that were colonized by Western Civilization countries are very lucky.

they are typically the top performing GDP countries of their region with some of the best quality of life for their citizens


Oh yes. Get the list of countries colonized by the awesome Western Civilization. You will be surprised to learn the world is a lot larger than US and Canada.


Just look at African or South American countries by GDP and see which ones are at the top of the list


You are aware that all South and Central American countries were colonized by Western Powers right?


Obviously he has no clue, and thinks all the (largely southern-)European-looking Spanish and Portuguese-speaking people there somehow descended from Aztecs and Incas.


The people that built it and made it that way in America were all immigrants.


I didn't know Bell labs employees Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were all immigrants


Steve Jobs' father and grandparents were Syrian.


> didn't used to be

That's false. By definition none would have come if there wasn't opportunity. You don't need to be a geography student to see that it wasn't just irreligious opportunity.


do you think opportunity just magically springs up in places or do you think people make it?


As stated, the geography of north America provides the opportunity, before there were Americans.

Gold rush and stuff is just a bonus, the big money is in cattle and agriculture.


People who are looking for opportunity see a place where they could make it.


Both


The value and commensurate compensation of talent depends on location. Proximity to colleagues, decision makers, and capital.


Somebody has to sacrifice to be the first to start something like that in their own country.

In America we built companies art and music out of our garages just for the love of it... not because "that's where the compensation was."


You guys move around for opportunity all the time.


Some not most


I think you meant all. All moves when disaster comes.

Meanwhile where there is food there is no need to move.


some people are farmers


Farmers move too when disaster comes. You are out of job, out of food, you move.

Meanwhile where there is food there is no need to move.


What are you talking about? Is this fact or romance? The country certainly did not become what it is through love of sacrifice.


They are. When a doctor immigrates from Nigeria to the US, then that's broadly speaking good for the US and bad for Nigeria.


is it though...


Both countries have a shortage of doctors, so yes.


That's not how it works. It depends on whether (how much) they are paid and if so what do they buy with that payment. Are they settled in US buying pizzas and Netflix?

Because if not, then investments to Nigeria past $x will grant it the upperhand since all that money can get you another doctor and more.



5 years is truly a big kill. looks like its a reaction to 99% of them refusing to send money back home and invest in Nigeria, preferring to buy-US and -Europe.


Not sure if you are deliberately misunderstanding at this point, but the problem is obviously not where the doctors spend their money, but the fact that they are not practicing medicine in Nigeria – as Nigeria might reasonably have hoped them to do once they completed their training.


? The problem is obviously whether (how much) the doctors are paid and where they spend that money.

You cannot expect an article to tell you these things.

Whether they work in Nigeria or not is not the issue. The issue is that they are doing it without compensating the country. Worse, they clearly don't intend to come back again (so you don't Ever get compensated at all, not just suffering time value of money) otherwise there's no need for a 5 year penalty. which is relatively huge compared to what the other countries are doing.

I guess sending money back home is not big in Nigeria culturally like it is in Mexico? Welp, I can't enforce you to send money back but guess what, I can enforce you to not leave at all.


>Whether they work in Nigeria or not is not the issue.

It absolutely is the issue, because Nigeria has a shortage of doctors. It has nothing to do with whether or not Nigerian doctors send money back home. If they send lots of money back home, they still aren't in Nigeria practicing medicine, which is what Nigeria actually wants.

If this was about money then there'd be no reason to make a law specific to doctors, as many other Nigerians emigrate for better economic prospects elsewhere.


whatafool, do apply common sense sometimes. Nigeria has a shortage of Everything. But it needs money more than it needs anything else.

> actually wants

Declared by who? And that politically correct statement is believed by who? [other than you]

> no reason to..

no reason??? Doctor training is one of the Top heavily subsidized by the state. (As with weapons. but none is chanting "Weapons Weapons" but "Doctors Doctors Doctors" because PC, as zelensky the clown has found out the hard way even for a christian country.) Sure, it's expensive to subsidize the capital for a literature major sitting in a beautiful airconditioned classroom with a courtyard and maybe swimming pool.. at least until you find out the annual mortgage of a PBT facility.

Tldr use common sense. If every doctor I export out of the country gets me 4.48b cf js.do/code/740428 (prepaid btw, for the correct interest rate to charge does not make any sense considering the country may not be around for another 99y), then I only need to export 100 per year [out of 220M] to twice my gdp; heck you'd do it all day long every single day.


It makes sense for big fish to seek big ponds


India and China arent big ponds?


Many pockets of the pond are not yet deep, making it unsuitable for many species.


But they are. Yet men being men will go where they think the money/food is.


When they leave their country it's called Brain Drain.


> the son of Taiwanese parents who sent their children to live with an uncle in the US. That's one of the many immigration paths that the MAGAs want to close.

Is this an actual immigration path that still remains open? I find it hard to believe.


It’s a patchwork. The latest policy to allow undocumented immigrant children to stay is from 2012 and still in effect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferred_Action_for_Childhood_...


No not really. Maybe in Ellis Island days.

Most born Americans certainly have no fainest clue how hard it is to legally immigrate to the USA already.


Actually it is incredibly easy. But keyword is not "productivity", it is "family".

Who knew.. that the racist plan to ensure the population stays white actually had the reverse effect.. 2024 and nothing's still being done about it because That's racist doh!


Family reunification with your uncle is impossible. You literally just proved my point.


You can't do it with an uncle and that does not make it hard. It is in fact incredibly easy.


For someone who has no immediate family in the USA (i.e. most people of the world) the reunification venue is closed. I'm not sure what you're trying to argue here.


But for someone who has, the door is wide wide wide open.


OK, so it being easy for a subset of people doesn't mean it's "easy" in general.


Yes and if you have 10 million dollars you have options for wealth immigration, the door is wide wide open. Do you think that makes immigration to the USA incredibly easy?


wealth immigration is the productivity path not family path


there's a lot of businesses simply built around hacking the US immigration system.

the people most likely to immigrate aren't the smartest but the people with the most money who can pay to hack the system


There really isn't much "hacking" going on, it's mostly fraud. Fictional marriages, fake jobs and so on. I was talking about legal ways.


[flagged]


55% of American unicorn startups have at least one immigrant founder.

Are you saying all those companies would still exist if there was no immigration?

Extending the same logic, the British colonies never needed to be established. Native Americans would have started Nvidia on their own eventually. (“Silicon Cahokia?”)


> 55% of American unicorn startups

dubious and meaningless metric

> Native Americans would have started Nvidia on their own eventually. (“Silicon Cahokia?”)

doubtful. It takes Western Civilization culture to build great things. It's why every other culture wants to immigrate to Western civilization and no one wants to immigrate in the reverse direction.


Men move where they think the money/food is. Being "western" does not allow the country to attract more but less. Nevertheless men did still move where the money/food is including perhaps to Antarctica where they didn't make it eventually, but did so in so many other continents.

> takes Western Civilization culture to build great things

That's crazy talk often uttered by supremacist [killers] who refuse to read history, thinking that Americans invented guns while knowing nothing of Suez canals, Congolese hands, Opium wars. Before the industrial revolution, the "barbarians" were not even on the map. It does take one from a superior culture to come to US and understand the people to know what mcbc (term I coined for "money cannot buy culture") means.

[btw you can give a baby all the land and oil in the world, that makes it rich, not cultured] [at least Genghis Khan doesn't go around pretending that he has learned culture]


> If an immigrant didn't start the company a legacy American like Mark Cuban or Gates would have.

Or somebody in another country?


Other countries have had 20 times the population of America for centuries and yet pre H1b America invented all modern computing, the internet, etc etc as we know it.

Not worried about other countries AT ALL.


Pre H1B America was still pulling a large number of people from Europe, many of whom were fleeing WWII or its aftermath. John Von Neumann, for example, was Hungarian (though he came to the US in 1930, so not a WWII refugee).

Europe didn't do as much of inventing modern computing (though Bletchley Park would like a word) because it was still trying to recover from the destruction of WWII, and that set them back a decade. China and India didn't, because they were more than a decade behind. Having 20 times the population doesn't mean you're at the cutting edge.


> all modern computing

not true

> the internet

www was invented at CERN by tim berner-lee though?


well DARPA net

but still I should expand my claim to say all modern computing was invented by Western countries


> a legacy American like Mark Cuban

From Wikipedia

> His paternal grandfather changed the surname from "Chabenisky" to "Cuban" after his family emigrated from Russia through Ellis Island.[14][15] His maternal grandparents were Romanian Jewish immigrants


Immigrant from Europe right?

That's where everyone in America came from.

Same culture, same history, same values.

Western civilization seems to create high trust societies that other cultures struggle to replicate.

People say America was founded on immigration which is true but they neglect to say that it was immigration FROM EUROPE.

Immigrants from non-western countries weren't allowed into America en masse until the 1965 immigration act.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_...


Steve Jobs - Iranian? Fatih and his wife Eren Ozmen (Sierra Nevada Corporation) are Turkish. Sergey Brin... Russian?

Seems every time you try to make some fundamentally discriminatory point the definition has to keep expanding form e.g. Britain, to EUROPE to Western to whatever.

Democracy is Greek. Our counting system is Arabic. 0 is an Indian concept. etc etc etc.

Progress is just a flame and people who know they can make it happen go to where other similar people are.


you name a few dubious outlier discoveries their origins of which are contested but I'll give them to you.

> Progress is just a flame and people who know they can make it happen go to where other similar people are.

yet progress only seems to be happening in Western countries and has been for centuries and everyone continuously tries to immigrate to Western countries and never in the reverse direction.

I struggle to agree with you


Western countries don't always progress do they? One of them went full in reverse last century. Similarly with everywhere else. When westerners were painting their faces and living in mud huts the Chinese were far more civilised. If you keep on thinking that you're superior you won't take the actions to stop your decline.


> has been for centuries.

Did you even bother picking up a for-kids textbook on world history? 250 years is incredibly short, it's not even 10%?

For centuries.. "western" countries did not even exist.


>That's where everyone in America came from.

What about the people who were already there? Surely they'd still be a substantial portion of the population?

I guess they must have all left voluntarily because they didn't agree with Western values.


> What about the people who were already there

they got conquered if you look at history books

> they didn't agree with Western values.

you don't ever disagree with people who you share the same values and culture with?


They got killed by germs, then divided by political moves, it wasn't really a conquest like the race for Africa was. It was really inspired by what the Spanish did to the Canarias,and used the same idiotic rethoric.

I don't agree with Cesaire much, but you cannot discuss about colonialism without reading him first.


> That's where everyone in America came from.

Er, quite a lot came from Africa.


[flagged]


Given your other replies to this thread, I am happy to be a midwit, if the other option was having your big brains.


I kinda agree with you

But given how Irish and Italians were treated back then, I imagine Eastern Europe immigrants had it even worse


[flagged]


a lot of insults and not a lot of information


Because when someone goes British and Russians "same culture, same history, same values"...

And ends it with America is "high trust" like as if they never heard of Japan...

And I still can't leave a darn Chromebook in the library for a 5min toilet break without losing it because the trust is so high.


Japan is an exception I'll give you that.

I live in a suburban town I can leave my stuff at a table and go to the restroom with no worries.

what do you think the difference between my town and yours is?


> suburban town

The difference is that one is a town and the other isn't. A town has barely any people. Just because you can leave your stuff at home does not make the country a high-trust country. Among countries US is a low-trust country.

> Japan is an exception

Japan is not the exception. It isn't even the leader, just a well-known and famous country. I encourage you to travel a bit and escape the echo chamber of Douglas Murray books and other western culture supremacists. Stop reading and start seeing. You will be shocked to find at least 100 high-trust cultures and will understand why your standards were that low.


Let me guess: "Strong, white, pure, European, Western culture?" This kind of content doesn't seem to meet the bar here at HN. There are plenty other Internet forums that welcome this kind of cultural supremacy talk.


> Recent immigrants tend to earn less than U.S.-born workers...because they are working without permission

This is the real problem. The Indian PhD grad on a H1B won't create the kinds of problems in the article. Media loves to put H1B/L1/EB1/EB2 holders with random people walking in via Mexico and doing odd jobs for cash in hand in the same category when their economic impact could not be more different.


Their economic impact is to deprive opportunities from Americans just like the people walking in from Mexico.

There is a strong equivalency there.

More people graduated in computer science in the United States in the last few years than ever before and they can't find jobs.

Doesn't it beg the question...if they're so good for the economy in America why aren't they good for the economy in their own country?


> deprive opportunities

Jury is out on this one. Japan has hardly any immigration yet their wages stagnated. Canada has a ton of immigration and their wages are also stagnant. Europe is somewhere between Japan and Canada, with also stagnant wages. Nobody disputes wages are stagnant, but the degree to which skilled immigration suppresses wages is an area where economists are unsure or even tilting towards a 'no' answer.

> if they're so good for the economy in America why aren't they good for the economy in their own country

There are so many jobs that are available only in industrialized countries. You won't find semiconductor fabs or airplane factories in undeveloped countries.


> wages stagnated

I don't really think wages are a proxy for opportunity as central banks can make currency worthless. There's computer science graduates in America who would take a job in their field for pittances just to be working in their field.

> There are so many jobs that are available only in industrialized countries

Well start! Half the startups in the 90s Americans built out of their garage.


A person in the US founding a startup has access and exposure to the deepest capital markets in the world, the largest domestic market in the world, a stable legal and political environment, and a phenomenal talent pool. A person doing the same in e.g. Vietnam has access to almost 0 VC funding, tiny domestic market, his efforts are hindered by a capricious and restrictive legal and political environment and a very low skilled talent pool. Someone with the same competency as say Bill Gates has an infinitely lower chance of making it big.

People do not risk their lives and leave their families behind because they really love going to Cheesecake Factory everday in the US, it's because opportunities often flat out do not exist in their country for what they want to do.

Even among successful businesses founded in (currently or formerly) less industrialized countries, you will see that a huge proportion are actually state owned or backed (e.g. TSMC, Samsung)


Opportunities didn't exist in America until Americans made them exist.

Apple was founded in a garage.

Time for people in other countries to do the same for their own country.

A good product or a good idea will surface.

Your excuses fall on deaf ears.


America had been a pristine land of opportunity long before the first American was born. Americans didn't make America, America made Americans.

Apple was founded after WWII (it would not exist today without a WWII victory).

Time for people in other countries to do the same what? War? More natives killing?

A good product or a good idea will surface tomorrow eventually.

But men being men will go where the money/food is today, no excuses needed. In fact no killing of natives needed either, so what's holding you back really?


...and yet America was built by immigrants who couldn't make opportunities at home.


America was a colony who overthrew a repressive dictatorship for it's independence.


...made up of immigrants who were looking for a better life.


They literally founded the country.


Before the pandemic, tech companies were not as async.

The pandemic proved that operations can continue in a semi-async manner.

Now in the post-2023 market, companies have begun to make that shift to global hiring now that async is normalized.

Outside North America, the salary for the top 15-20% of SWEs is roughly comparable to each other in every country so it makes it easier to scale out teams and speed up product and feature delivery, especially now that American trained engineers on visas were the first to be let go during the 2023-24 layoffs, and for the past decade, CS majors from the top universities in China (Project 985 programs) and India (INIs) have largely stopped moving abroad except for graduate programs.

I warned this would happened in the start of the pandemic, and have kept saying it since.


There is an easy solution: Don't require residency for employment. Everyone is entitled to full protections of labor law, document immigrant or not. This eliminates much of the incentive to abuse non-documented labor. Then make it even stronger. If a non-resident employee brings suit against an employer for violating labor laws in a significant way, and they win, then they are entitled to citizenship as repayment for helping to enforce our labor laws.


So now workers have unlimited competition. That sounds like it will put a lot of power in the hands of corporations in terms of being able to replace workers.


My understanding is that Americans aren't willing to work a lot of lower wage jobs. I think that Mexicans harvest most of the crops in California. A friend of mine in California needed roof repairs and he says that all the American workers were pretty lackadaisical, while the Mexicans worked pretty hard. I believe a lot of hotel staff are immigrants as well, and after the pandemic smaller hotels were simply unable to hire staff. Lawn care is another industry. If anything, I think immigration as regards these areas may be a handout to farmers and homeowners needing manual labor.

H-1Bs are another issue, but since it's capped at something like 50k, I'm not sure how much it's really contributing to lower wages, especially given how software has some of the highest wages in the economy. I don't think the "poorest Americans" are going to be working in tech, though. I've worked with some of the kids in this category, and my conclusion is that poverty is a culture and a mindset. Those without that mindset (frequently children of immigrants) gain the skills necessary to leave.


I interpret your story as the American workers thinking "wow, I'm not getting paid enough to deal with this s***."

I also interpret your story as the children of immigrants realizing "wow, I'm not going to be paid enough to deal with the s** * my parents deal/dealt with." So they find a way to get a tech job or desk job.

One could just as easily denigrate the children of immigrants as being lackadasical, but that's not necessary. Why denigrate people?


I'm not sure where the denigration is?

> to work a lot of lower wage

> all the American workers were pretty lackadaisical, while the Mexicans worked pretty hard

Truth


>Americans aren't willing to work a lot of lower wage jobs.

Then the wages are not high enough in those jobs. They should either pay more or get automated. Bringing in desperate people who are willing to live and under worse conditions is not an ethically sound solution.


> ethically

Don't start that pretend. This was never about ethics. Pretending that it's about ethics is instant KO.

(Ethics is measured by how many such desperate people you allow to come in, not how many you yet refuse, subjecting them to even worse alternatives)


The jobs wouldn’t be lower wage in the first place if businesses didn’t have immigrants to exploit.


Wages are not significantly lower.

For example, Trump's H1B prevailing wages rules are still in place so at most the salary difference is 15-20% (which is basically nil as a hiring manager)

In "lower skilled labor" like manual Construction the average wages tend to be middle of the pack for those states [0]

For white collar jobs, the biggest driver for the slowing hiring market is the fact that companies have shown that they can operate in a global async manner, which means shareholders and board members like my Peers are increasingly pushing for hiring abroad as a way to speed delivery.

[0] - https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472061.htm


> It is a handout to corporations.

You are right, but unfortunately you are not completely right.

The problem lies in a universal truth: people buy cheap.

A corporation that can afford lower wages is a corporation that can maintain its customer base. If American corporations stooped their effort in reducing costs, they'd lose their effort to foreign corporations with easier access to lower wages and less ecological constraints.

The enemy of the poorest Americans are not the immigrants, but the richer Americans. As a thought experiment, imagine running a trade shop employing only American workers: start advertising the fact that you pay socially-acceptable wages to them; and explain your potential customers that, by paying more for the same service, they'll get the honour of helping their fellow citizens. I'm sure your phone will not ring that often!


> The enemy of the poorest Americans are not the immigrants, but the richer Americans

it's both


Tell that to the Emiratis who get to eat and sleep all day.


Yes, it distorts wages as a function of supply and demand. Workers cannot bargain, because corporations simply import new people.

In the EU it is done by both importing people and extending the EU eastwards. The quality of life has dropped dramatically in the original EU countries.


> The quality of life has dropped dramatically in the original EU countries.

That doesn't reflect the reality that I see at all. The only area where quality of life is worse than previous generations is in property ownership - particularly in bigger cities and suburbs. But that's reflected across many industrialised nations from UK, Canada, NZ, Australia, so it's not a problem just limited to EU countries.

Otherwise the net price of "stuff" from electronics, cars, food, clothes, shoes and household accessories have fallen a lot in real terms and people have lots more than ever before - maybe too much ?


Yes we all have seen how the UK got rid of those pesky EU FoM Eastern Europeans and replaced them with Asians that accept an even lower salary


> The quality of life has dropped dramatically in the original EU countries.

This is, on the whole, bullshit.


I think you'll find people in the EU compare their situation to the economic situation of their parents. That comparison goes very badly. In the 70s-80s-90s an uneducated worker could support a "suburban" house (newly built, that they'd own after 20 years or so and retire in), stay-at-home wife, car, send 2-3 kids to school and college and have money left over for a yearly holiday with 5 people.

Compare that to even a current PhD making 3k euros per month with house prices starting at 300k for pretty bad (certainly not newly built) and smaller than the one their parents had, and they find they can't afford it on 2 full-time wages.

So "quality of life has dropped dramatically". Yes. Yes it has. In other ways quality of life has advanced, yes, but the basics ... the basics are a disaster.

And this is the situation in the most economically prosperous side of Europe. Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Nordics, France, Germany. If you do the same comparison in the middle or south of France, Northern Italy or Spain it'll be 10x worse. If you do it in Portugal, Southern Italy or Greece, it'll be 100x worse, hence everybody is leaving. And if you do it in Eastern Europe it'll be even worse: everyone (who even remotely can) HAS left.


> In the 70s-80s-90s an uneducated worker could support

Then the entire West started buying cheap from China and imposing rigid environmental constraints locally, and manufacturing jobs left forever.


Also we still had gas and oil from the north sea. Since the production peaked, energy is expensive, thus everything is.


your basic point is that the cost of housing has increased to levels that are making life difficult for most people.

However the language you use is exaggerated to the point of hysteria, which kind of undermines everything you say.

Also, your original point was about immigration. There is a housing crisis even in countries with relatively low levels of immigration, which indicates that other factors are at play.

> . If you do it in Portugal, Southern Italy or Greece, it'll be 100x worse, hence everybody is leaving. And if you do it in Eastern Europe it'll be even worse: everyone (who even remotely can) HAS left.

While there are high levels of emigration in these places, what you're saying is exaggerated to the point of being bullshit.


> how many more citizens would be training for these roles if it weren't for H-1B visa.

Yeah, Indian citizens, because the tech jobs can be done there just as well for a fourth of the cost. There is a massive push within companies to make this happen.


If you want high salaries you can just multiply all the financial numbers by 100. Then workers all get to be millionaires. Doesn't help much though; "high salaries" are one of those distractions from what matters - high living standards.

The question is really whether a migrant will produce more or less over their lifetime than the resources they consume. If they produce less, then the balance has to come from existing citizens. But it has nothing to do with whether more labour is a net win for corporations or not. The problem is if they come in and do low productivity work that wasn't going to happen at all in a counterfactual where they didn't migrate.


[flagged]


Would you be okay with highly skilled immigrants then? Or would large amounts of them (us) piss you off as well? I consider the fact that anyone can come to America and become American regardless of ethnicity actually amazing. Fuck nation states where you need to look a certain way to be considered as one of them.


The people who used to live in the USA disagreed with you.

“A long time ago, this land belonged to our fathers, but when I go up to the river, I see camps of soldiers on its banks. These soldiers cut down my timber, they kill my buffalo, and when I see that, my heart feels like bursting.” – Satanta, Kiowa Chief

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_genocide_in_th...

But almost all of them have been killed and those that remain seem to lack a distinct political voice that's in any way relevant to the national discourse of the USA. All of those nation states that pre-existed "America" were, as you say, fucked.


Wow my eyes are open now, I can totally see how those two are exactly the same


[flagged]


It's almost as ironic as a white nationalist feeling patriotic about North America.


[flagged]


The rich have never cared about things you mentioned. They have always exploited the working class, all this talk of "shared blood, culture and history" has largely been just a tool of control, not something they actually cared about. Before that, it was God which they used to keep the peasants in control.

Fair distribution of wealth, that is ultimately the only real question that matters. The ultra-rich are the threat to our nations, not the poor masses of immigrants, who are simply brought in to make them even more money.


The lack of historical context on immigration in U.S. is par for course. There has always been massive immigration to U.S. since 18th Century. Talking about "nation of people of shared blood" is a Fantasy


> a nation of people of shared blood, culture, and history.

That time has passed.

Nowadays, travelling is extremely easy compared to a mere century ago. You can have your family half a planet far from your life, and still maintain sufficient contact. Emigration was never this easy.


> There is absolutely no point to a country unless it is a nation of people of shared blood, culture, and history.

Arguably, USA has never been this. And yet there is definitely a "point" to it.


> No, I literally could not care less about the 'economy'.

People who say that usually go crazy when gas goes up .50 a gallon then they can't afford filling their monster truck on top of the 1000/mo payment already


“Their own kind”

Wow, when did HN become stormfront?


There are a few serial trolls who frequently create new accounts to post like that. We ban them and then they create new accounts—such is the cycle of TrollLife. It's best to abide by ancient wisdom and not feed them by replying.


It didn't. But some people who lean that way do post here.

And they get downvoted and flagged. They exist here, but HN did not "become" them.


That is overplaying the situation. Entry level jobs have sort dried up anyway and the birthrate decline doesn't seem to be related to migration.


The research is pretty overwhelming. Immigrants contribute much more than they take, and the increase in prosperity benefits everyone.

You should actually sit down and study the topic, because your belief system is terrifying in its ignorance.


[flagged]


French people using the slang used by American racists? That’s a new one.

“State mandated dose of neutral..” what?

You clearly didn’t go the same brain washing public school systems I went to in America (California of all places) where they told us a gigantic pile of lies about basically everything that happened in our history that I’m still trying to unlearn 20+ years later.


How do you know for sure you're not just replacing these lies with others (perhaps more credible, better engineered and camouflaged)?


[flagged]


[flagged]


I've banned the above account (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41447769), but please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: your account has unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines a lot as well, not just in this thread but in many threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41208642 (Aug 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41046824 (July 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41019101 (July 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41019067 (July 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40936702 (July 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40936599 (July 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40895260 (July 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40862324 (July 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40471444 (May 2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40320673 (May 2024)

I'm not putting you in the same class as that other account, obviously, but there are different forms of abuse and you've unfortunately been repeatedly doing some of them, such as by posting flamebait, ideological battle comments, and personal attacks.

I don't want to ban you, because you've also posted good comments and you've been here for years, but we need you to stop posting like this. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use HN as intended, that would be good. Complaining about how much the site has deteriorated and how other people are wrecking it does not make it ok to wreck it yourself.


Like in 1607


I’m not working those fields, neither will anyone I know. Will you, or anyone you know?

Those field workers, that literally keep us fed, have like 2/3 the life expectancy of the average American in the same area, or something ridiculous like that. Too lazy to google the exact numbers at the moment (on my phone). This is an open “secret” of the industry. Sadly slavery still exists, just doesn’t look like it used to.

I think you think you know more than you actually know. When I started reading about it, I wished I hadn’t. I felt sick to my stomach hearing the shit that still goes on to this day.

“Looting the coffers for welfare…” <- this is hilariously wrong. If I recall correctly, illegal typically pay into the system, but typically do not withdraw for fear of deportation. Your numbers are backwards. Last I checked, white Americans were the largest recipients of welfare by a substantial margin.

The reality is so bad, I can’t stomach learning any more about it. I feel so awful for those poor people.


Welcome to the 21th century, buckle up because if there's one truth in this mess, it's that it can always get worse, no exception.




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