{"id":7080,"date":"2017-08-05T11:24:30","date_gmt":"2017-08-05T17:24:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=7080"},"modified":"2017-08-05T11:24:30","modified_gmt":"2017-08-05T17:24:30","slug":"immigration-labor-shortages-wage-hikes-lazy-americans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2017\/08\/immigration-labor-shortages-wage-hikes-lazy-americans.html","title":{"rendered":"Immigration, labor shortages, wage hikes, and “lazy Americans”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"<\/p>\n

In immigration news lately (links selected for convenience rather than endorsement of any specific news\/opinion site):<\/p>\n

The Cotton-Purdue \u201cRAISE\u201d bill was introduced<\/a>, which aims to half the number of immigrants per year while dramatically shifting them from extended family-reunification to skills-based, using a Canadian-style points system.<\/p>\n

CNN reporter Jim Acosta accused<\/a> Trump advisor Stephen Miller of, well, being un-American for violating the Statue of Liberty\u2019s welcome for the poorest of the poor by preferring instead the educated.<\/p>\n

Senator John McCain<\/a> said that he wants to resurrect the \u201cGang of 8\u201d immigration amnesty bill from 2013.<\/p>\n

Various outlets have been writing that wages for low-skill work is finally on the uptick, and putting a negative spin on it because they tend to take the employer\u2019s\/customer\u2019s<\/a> perspective rather than that of employees finally getting raises.<\/p>\n

A particularly flaky take on this was a\u00a0Bloomberg column yesterday, \u201cTrump\u2019s Immigration Plan Hurts Working Families<\/a>,\u201d which claimed that the lack of immigrant workers would harm poor families struggling to access \u201chigh-quality\u201d childcare \u2014 never mind that, at present, immigrants who provide childcare seem to be doing so largely as nannies for the affluent (often, to my understanding, leaving their own children behind in their native country), and, judging by the groups one sees at the zoo during the summer, poor children are cared for in small-business\/in-home daycares not by immigrant women but by mothers from their own demographic. \u00a0I hardly think, in any case, that a non-English-speaking worker can provide \u201chigh-quality\u201d daycare, particularly in a childcare center setting.<\/p>\n

So here\u2019s my current take:<\/p>\n

Whether, and to what degree, we allow immigration on humanitarian grounds is a question of, well, a sort of foreign aid, it seems to me, and a blog post for another day. \u00a0But as to the question of immigrants as workers, in light of the issue of various jobs having low wages and poor working conditions, it seems to me that we could set some basic criteria, such as a plan to\u00a0import new immigrants to fill certain job classifications when<\/p>\n

a) the wages for those jobs climb past whatever level progressives have deemed a \u201cliving wage\u201d,<\/p>\n

b) the wage increases climb at a rate well past inflation for several years running, and<\/p>\n

c) employers cannot manage to hire enough Americans even when paying at above-market rates, with above-market working conditions (e.g., slowing down past \u201cspeed-ups\u201d), and training employees on-the-job for job-specific skills<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Instead, the pro-immigration, pro-high minimum wage folks seem to want to have their cake and eat it too<\/strong> \u2014 wanting to mandate\u00a0a $15 minimum wage but simultaneously claiming that we need immigrants to do our cheap labor for us, as if they don\u2019t also have bodies to feed and shelter, and don\u2019t have children to care for, and the like.<\/p>\n

With respect to the third item, the largest issue is not \u201cbackbreaking\u201d work \u2014 employers can remedy a lot with alleviated working conditions, and could even hire two 6-hour employees rather than expect a single employee to work 12 hour days, or even longer. \u00a0Employers can also provide above-mandatory break times, cool down hot worksites, and so on. \u00a0And yes, we might have to switch in our food choices to items which can be produced with more mechanization.<\/p>\n

But the issue where I am sympathetic with employers is seasonality. \u00a0Per my post yesterday<\/a>, it\u2019s very difficult to remedy the seasonality of work that follows the harvest, or the summer tourist season, or the like. \u00a0I can picture the book about farmers that I read to my boys, which was old even when we got our hands on it, from a used book sale, telling an idealized version of the seasons of a family farm, when winter was quiet and the season for doing repairs around the house and to the farm equipment. \u00a0Maybe someone whose livelihood is a restaurant or a gift shop at a vacation spot spends the rest of the year on other projects. \u00a0But I can well understand that we\u2019d want to hire from elsewhere \u2014 though such hires should then clearly be just for a single season, not indefinitely.<\/p>\n

Having said this, I was a part of a facebook exchange yesterday which put another part of the \u201cjobs Americans won\u2019t do\u201d issue into a different light.<\/p>\n

It is not imaginary that Mexican immigrants, at a low-skilled job like restaurant dishwashing or the like, are likely to show a greater work ethic than Americans. \u00a0But\u00a0there is nothing \u201cmagical\u201d about the work ethic of immigrants, whether Mexicans or in general. It\u2019s just that, in comparing Mexican illegal immigrant workers against native-born Americans, in such areas as, say, a restaurant dishwasher or a farm worker or a roofer, we\u2019re comparing the highest\u00a0Xth percentile of Mexicans to the lowest Xth percentile of Americans, in terms of ambition and work ethic. \u00a0We\u2019re not comparing like with like. \u00a0<\/strong>Regardless of whether illegally crossing borders and seeking out fake IDs or working under the table is moral or not, it is certainly an indicator of ambition for someone born into a poor family with no means to access education in one\u2019s home country. \u00a0But an American with a similar level of ambition, even if born into a poor family, would be one of those kids featured as a heartwarming success story, or, even if they didn\u2019t amaze everyone with their achievements, would have at least acquired some skill or education, whether that\u2019s as an electrician or a secretary.<\/p>\n

But you can\u2019t just sweep the \u201cunambitionless Americans\u201d (call them lazy, call them shiftless if that label didn\u2019t have the racial connotation) under the rug and wish them away into nothingness (or the Lego-Batman Phantom Zone or another dimension) because employers don\u2019t like having to deal with them. \u00a0And we can\u2019t just say, \u201csucks to be you; go find yourself some ambition,\u201d and walk away, much as we\u2019d like for this group of chronically-unemployed people to be other people than they are. \u00a0There is no magic answer, no way in which we can say, \u201cbeing lazy is immoral,\u201d and transform them into people who want to work as hard as the top-percentile ambitioneers, and it\u2019s been a long time since we\u2019ve been willing to starve people into a better work ethic.<\/p>\n

Which means we either need a job market which is tight enough where employers will be willing to train them into a work ethic, and also accept a slower-paced work environment<\/strong>, or we need some sort of universal basic income \u2014 and, yeah, sorry, but I\u2019m of the opinion that we are far, far away from being wealthy enough as a country to afford the latter.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Image from Wikimedia Commons.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In immigration news lately (links selected for convenience rather than endorsement of any specific news\/opinion site): The Cotton-Purdue \u201cRAISE\u201d bill was introduced, which aims to half the number of immigrants per year while dramatically shifting them from extended family-reunification to skills-based, using a Canadian-style points system. CNN reporter Jim Acosta accused Trump advisor Stephen Miller […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":1382,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[463,46],"class_list":["post-7080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-illegal-immigration","tag-immigration"],"yoast_head":"\nImmigration, labor shortages, wage hikes, and "lazy Americans"<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In immigration news lately (links selected for convenience rather than endorsement of any specific news\/opinion site): The Cotton-Purdue "RAISE" bill was\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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