Immigration opponents just make up things so they can claim immigration caused it. The biggest tell is that they mention wage suppression, because they think it'll make them sound sympathetic - but there is absolutely zero evidence that immigration lowers any native wages, and theoretically you should expect it to increase them because of increased demand. (Conversely, when people move away this reduces demand and lowers your wages.)
That and employment for prime aged (i.e. not retirement age) Americans is as high as it's ever been.
Fortunately, we don't need to listen to any "academic economists" (who need to toe the party line) or even internet "experts", we can simply observe reality.
During COVID lockdowns, UK farmers complained that they can't get cheap foreigners to pick their strawberries. Obviously "lack of workforce" is just a propaganda expression for "we don't pay enough". Open borders directly reduces wages.
A single article with no counterfactual isn't as good as the existing literature, which has plenty of empirical studies (https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-...). Academics love disagreeing with each other and economists are pretty bipartisan relative to other fields.
> Obviously "lack of workforce" is just a propaganda expression for "we don't pay enough"
Looks to me like this needs a specialized skilled workforce, otherwise they won't be able to pick the fruit in time for it to stay ripe.
Paying a smaller population of workers more will not necessarily encourage them to develop enough skills to do this job. It might just be left undone and then no fruit. If you have a larger population of potential workers, then there's more room for people to specialize in this because you have a larger economy.
> James Porter said 200 workers normally travelled to his farm in Scryne, Angus, from eastern Europe.
I'd like to know which part of Eastern Europe that means. If it was Ukraine they were bad then and worse now, but if it's Poland they have incredible economic growth right now and are on track to pass the UK before too long.
There is a current discussing in Sweden about the issue of human trafficking in picking fruits. Historically we have had a fairly large source of Asians being tricked to travel to northern Europe to pick forest fruits, with passports being taken, payments being withheld, and living standards beyond reasons. Last year a fairly large case was brought to bring down the human slavery and disgusting practices, and as a result the practice has been significantly reduced.
As a result the prices of forest fruit has increase multiple times and food companies are reporting a significant increase in costs thus needing to reduce the number of employees. Every industry above in the chain is feeling the economical impact of losing the human slavery. Local government is also concerned since the created void, in combination with increase wages, may encourage new independent illegal workers which then the state must handle.
Even leaving aside the human trafficking component, a lot of berry picking looks like a scam in Sweden. The costs to travel and live in Sweden rarely cover their earned wages. Their per hour earnings are surely far below Swedish minimum wage laws. Why do the Swedes allow it to continue?
The reason why Swedes allow it to continue is of similar reasons why people allow human trafficking in construction. It occurs in the background where it is not seen, it reduces costs, and makes people money.
If human slavery was a net-loss for countries then it wouldn't be historical popular. Be it building roads, railways, bridges, buildings, harvesting or picking fruits, those are not things people in general want to see prices increase. People who talk about illegal immigrants being a net-positive on the economy never talk about that aspect, in the same way that those being against illegal immigrants do not want to talk about increased costs. Even people who talk about human trafficking do not want to talk about human trafficking in construction or food production.
At one point the police even announced (as part of a political move in order to get more budget) that they would stop investigating construction places for human trafficking since just going to a single construction place would fill their work quota for that year, and thus everything else would had to be put at hold. Everyone who work in construction are fully aware of the open secret that a large part of all work is done by illegal workers that do not pay taxes (or minimum wages), do not get safety equipment, and is not limited by regulations that exist to protect workers. Sweden is far from unique in this aspect.
<< I'd like to know which part of Eastern Europe that means.
Not OP, but I can absolutely vouch for local negative sentiment in Eastern Europe. Granted, some of it is a direct result of war in Ukraine ( and a lot of those refugees getting benefits and priority for government services in host countries ).
It is hard for the population in general to get that they are getting a deal, when they don't. Maybe some individual billionaire does, but if anything, it only exacerbates the issue further by focusing anger on that one person.
I too am suspicous when companies and industries complain they cannot get enough cheap labour. However, there is a balance to be struck. If the UK needed to pay natives at prevailing wages, it might be 15 GBP per hour (or more) to pick strawberries, and then strawberries would probably double in price at the market... and very few people would buy them. When UK was part of the EU, there was freedom of movement, so a lot of seasonal workers came from Eastern Europe to work the fields in the UK. This probably helped to reduce UK food prices.
What bothers me much more: When companies and industries that generate middle class jobs (and above) complain about being unable to find workers. After the GFC ended around 2009, this was a constant complaint in business newspapers for many years (I guess at least five years during the post-GFC recovery). It was so obviously bullshit to even the most casual observer: The offered wages were much too low, so jobs stayed unfilled for months on end. In short, they wanted high skill people to work for low wages.
> Open borders directly reduces wages.
If this were true, how to do you explain why the UK grew so much faster than other EU nations in the decade before Brexit? Similarly, how do you explain how much worse is the UK economic story after Brexit? It seems exactly the opposite of what you wrote. One thing I will grant you: Open borders suppress wages for low skill workers. That is pretty much undeniable. The people hurt most by EU freedom of movement are low skill natives.
> how to do you explain why the UK grew so much faster than other EU nations in the decade before Brexit? Similarly, how do you explain how much worse is the UK economic story after Brexit? It seems exactly the opposite of what you wrote.
Are you sure about that? It seems about equal to me [1]...
In any case, Brexit didn't cause closing the borders; immigration into the UK increased massively [2] (i.e. the politicians didn't deliver what the people wanted). Any negative changes to the UK economy were more likely caused by decrease in trade with the EU... [3] Although COVID makes all these statistics suspect.
P-hack badly-constructed datasets until they find a coincidence in a dataset that reinforces their preferred narrative.
I mean, no, not all of them do that all of the time.
But it seems to be pretty common, and I'm not at all convinced that it's smarter, more correct, or wiser to live by research than by subjective experience.
Someone pointed out online, I forgot who, that the problem with job reports is two fold
It reports only those actively looking for a job or employed, so it leaves out people who simply aren’t participating in the labor market anymore because they can’t find one.
It also reports all jobs, not the quality of the jobs. Average Americans feel the job market today is terrible and largely does not look at part time and near minimum wage work roles growing as a positive. The jobs report doesn’t disaggregate higher paying jobs from lower ones
That may be true of the monthly jobs report numbers (don't remember how they work), but if you need to know then it's not an issue because there's alternatives.
Here's reports for all these that don't have those issues, as they just come from surveys.
> It reports only those actively looking for a job or employed, so it leaves out people who simply aren’t participating in the labor market anymore because they can’t find one.
This simply asks "do you have a job", and it's up to the people responding to decide if being an Uber driver is a job.
> Average Americans feel the job market today is terrible and largely does not look at part time and near minimum wage work roles growing as a positive.
Btw, I think focusing on "jobs" isn't the best thing to look at - the poorest people in a country will always be children and the elderly, and hopefully we don't want them to get jobs.
The jobs report is what most
media parrots across all media platforms more or less is the monthly jobs report and definitely the one I’m referencing.
No matter how you cut it though Americans do not feel they are getting their fair share economically and want to avenge that, which is why I think voters didn’t push back against tariffs - which have become a cornerstone of economic rhetoric by Trump and his allies - at the ballot box.
I think it’s also because a good chunk of the electorate doesn’t quite understand how tariffs work and it’s going to backfire, but the sentiment is very clear
Americans had what's called a vibecession where they universally thought the economy was bad, but then answered every question about their own finances by saying they were good. The implication was they thought it was bad for everyone else, just not them, so that's mostly on the media's negativity bias.
There was some hangover effect from inflation, although of course that's going to get worse now.
"I've been demonstrably wrong in every single point but I'm still right because I feel like it" is such a good demonstration of what happened this election.
Some people are hurting because there's always some people hurting, and for some reason that means we get the party that wants to reduce social safety nets?!
It seems fairly evident that human trafficking has had an economical positive effect on countries who practiced it. It is an common observed fact that the current construction sector is dependent on human trafficking and most current construction projects would fail to meet their goals without a steady stream of cheap, untaxed illegal labor that do not need to follow safety regulations.
However for people who work in those sectors the picture tend to look differently with wages and good safety practices being suppressed. Construction companies that follow regulations and pay taxes for all their employees will loose in the competitive market. The effect on the economy may be a net-positive, and it may also be true that most countries could not contain growth if construction actually cost as much as it had to without the illegal practices, but that is all multiple aspects of the same issue.
Immigration does have a net benefit to the economy, generally, but of course it tends to depress wages for anyone in sectors the immigrants are landing jobs in. Even NPR admits this, when they cover the topic. If this weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be a bunch of us wanting to loosen rules about foreign-trained doctors practicing in the US.
Whether those sectors include most of the people worried that their wages will be suppressed, when who we’re talking about are illegal immigrants who mostly do stuff like chicken processing and house framing/roofing, is another matter.
It’s weird that “we had a bipartisan bill to address specifically this thing you’re worried about, likely to pass and be signed into law, and Trump scuttled it so he could keep complaining about it” didn’t resonate. Frankly, if that’s too “technical” a message to be received, we really are fucked.
One reason for this is that immigrants have differing and complementary skills from natives - eg just speaking a different native language is a skill - and so they're not likely to land in the same sectors. They're more similar to other immigrants from the same place, and so it's more likely they'd lower each other's wages. I think this is totally believable, but the demand factor is still very important here - one immigrant could start a business and employ others etc.
> If this weren’t the case, there wouldn’t be a bunch of us wanting to loosen rules about foreign-trained doctors practicing in the US.
Doctors in the US are a special case because their number is so limited by the AMA and by (US government funded) residency slots. So yes, this could lower their wages if foreign doctors have similar enough skills to compete with them vs complement them. But it's more important for us to just stop limiting how many new doctors we train.
This wouldn't necessarily hurt them though; I mean it probably would, but if it made healthcare more affordable resulting in more people going to see doctors, then they'd all get paid more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Yeah the full answer is “it’s complicated and yes maybe some people see wages depressed or increases that would have happened, slowed, by immigration”. It can, for a given individual or even sector, do the thing people are worried about, even if most benefit—mean or even median wages tending to go up isn’t the same as your wages will go up. Simplified “it doesn’t lower wages” messaging has a smell to people burned by other neoliberal policies, and they’re not wrong to detect a hint of the ol’ BS, even if their concern is overblown or misplaced.
A guy answered me in another comment where I was saying similar things about wages, and apparently it's not true, it's an interesting read (which I can't criticize or comment since I'm not knowledgeable in economics) https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/repost-why-immigration-doesnt-...
It can be the case that immigration tends to buoy wages over all, while there do exist some for whom immigration will depress wages. Again, we’re definitely trying to do this when we craft targeted policies aimed at bringing in or discouraging immigrants for specific professions, and it does have the effect one would expect.
We have a history of doing the Neoliberal “well this will make line go up and we can just help the few whom it harms” and then not helping those few, so I get why people worried their wages might be some of the ones affected aren’t thrilled. Whether most of the folks so-concerned would actually see such a thing, is another matter (I’m guessing not, in at least 95% of cases of people with those concerns).
> but there is absolutely zero evidence that immigration lowers any native wages
What? You’re really claiming that increasing the supply side of a market has no effect on prices? That’s absurd. You shouldn’t need evidence for common sense. If labour supply is essentially unlimited then there is never pressure to increase wages. A literal child can understand this…
Using a pure supply argument for the labor market is the worst possible one to do it on. It's usually okay, but labor is people, and people are the source of all demand, so you really have to consider both of them.
Also, I'm going by empirical studies here. Those are better than beliefs, because truth is stranger than fiction.
All I know is in the UK it's not uncommon for jobs to get thousands of applications. I'm pretty confident the immigration is hitting the supply side more than demand. Most of this immigration is from low skilled workers on poverty wages, I'm struggling to see how this would massively increase demand elsewhere in the labour market.
Since immigration started increasing in the late 90's wages have been stagnant. Correlation doesn't equal causation, but hmm.
Where I'm from the shortage of supply is also due in varying proportions to: too many airbnbs and secondary residence, rural flight, families being split in multiple households, increase of average home size, etc. Immigration certainly plays a part, but likely not as much as you think.
Biggest cause is insufficient increase in supply, often due to government regulations.
Immigration can heavily increase demand, and so it can play a big part, depending on the immigration numbers. Anyone moving in needs a place to live as well.
That issue goes far beyond immigration. You want a job, especially one that has growth potential? You move to a city, regardless of if you are a native or not. You can see all the same trends in cities and countries without a lot of immigration.
Housing is also one of the few issues that is so local and immigration is such a tiny story around it to begin with. Prices are high in plenty of areas seeing little immigration activity
If the immigration is double the normal expected growth (~tripling the growth) it is not really tiny. It may very well be solvable, maybe even easily.
But the problem in many European countries is that "the left" does not even acknowledge that this may be a problem and should be solved leading to many people voting for "the far right" that does acknowledge that this is a problem.
In the US housing may not be the biggest issue, but the result is the same: the average voter can choose between "there is no problem, we can take in as many immigrant as we want forever" and "we don't want immigration".
This argument just doesn't make sense. The US annual population growth is currently 0.5%. Between 1960 and 2000 it rarely went below 1%, but since 2010 it's always been well under.
Many of the most expensive cities in the US have relatively low immigration compared to other areas with much more reasonable real estate, and it behooves you to link it where housing is expensive and immigration is very high. You have to actually provide some sources before you throw out blanket comments blaming immigrants for our problems
You’re entirely against people coming here? You’re not focused on undocumented migrants?
You’re also failing to draw a causal link here. Not to mention NYC is one of the biggest cities in the world period (10th). It’s hardly representative of most US cities.
