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Immigration, labor shortages, wage hikes, and “lazy Americans”

Immigration, labor shortages, wage hikes, and “lazy Americans”

Last updated on: August 5, 2017 at 11:24 am by Jane the Actuary

Immigration, labor shortages, wage hikes, and “lazy Americans” 2017-08-05T11:24:30-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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

The Cotton-Purdue “RAISE” 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 of, well, being un-American for violating the Statue of Liberty’s welcome for the poorest of the poor by preferring instead the educated.

Senator John McCain said that he wants to resurrect the “Gang of 8” immigration amnesty bill from 2013.

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’s/customer’s perspective rather than that of employees finally getting raises.

A particularly flaky take on this was a Bloomberg column yesterday, “Trump’s Immigration Plan Hurts Working Families,” which claimed that the lack of immigrant workers would harm poor families struggling to access “high-quality” childcare — 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. I hardly think, in any case, that a non-English-speaking worker can provide “high-quality” daycare, particularly in a childcare center setting.

So here’s my current take:

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. But 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 import new immigrants to fill certain job classifications when

a) the wages for those jobs climb past whatever level progressives have deemed a “living wage”,

b) the wage increases climb at a rate well past inflation for several years running, and

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 “speed-ups”), and training employees on-the-job for job-specific skills.

Instead, the pro-immigration, pro-high minimum wage folks seem to want to have their cake and eat it too — wanting to mandate a $15 minimum wage but simultaneously claiming that we need immigrants to do our cheap labor for us, as if they don’t also have bodies to feed and shelter, and don’t have children to care for, and the like.

With respect to the third item, the largest issue is not “backbreaking” work — 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. Employers can also provide above-mandatory break times, cool down hot worksites, and so on. And yes, we might have to switch in our food choices to items which can be produced with more mechanization.

But the issue where I am sympathetic with employers is seasonality. Per my post yesterday, it’s very difficult to remedy the seasonality of work that follows the harvest, or the summer tourist season, or the like. I 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. Maybe someone whose livelihood is a restaurant or a gift shop at a vacation spot spends the rest of the year on other projects. But I can well understand that we’d want to hire from elsewhere — though such hires should then clearly be just for a single season, not indefinitely.

Having said this, I was a part of a facebook exchange yesterday which put another part of the “jobs Americans won’t do” issue into a different light.

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. But there is nothing “magical” about the work ethic of immigrants, whether Mexicans or in general. It’s 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’re comparing the highest Xth percentile of Mexicans to the lowest Xth percentile of Americans, in terms of ambition and work ethic. We’re not comparing like with like. 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’s home country. But 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’t amaze everyone with their achievements, would have at least acquired some skill or education, whether that’s as an electrician or a secretary.

But you can’t just sweep the “unambitionless Americans” (call them lazy, call them shiftless if that label didn’t 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’t like having to deal with them. And we can’t just say, “sucks to be you; go find yourself some ambition,” and walk away, much as we’d like for this group of chronically-unemployed people to be other people than they are. There is no magic answer, no way in which we can say, “being lazy is immoral,” and transform them into people who want to work as hard as the top-percentile ambitioneers, and it’s been a long time since we’ve been willing to starve people into a better work ethic.

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, or we need some sort of universal basic income — and, yeah, sorry, but I’m of the opinion that we are far, far away from being wealthy enough as a country to afford the latter.

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

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