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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   28444 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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White-collar migrants are even worse since you are making college admissions and jobs even harder for your kid but you are also ensuring votebanks, unstable coalitions

That's how I (and I think a lot of Trump voters) feel about it. For a long time now the standard line has been that immigration is good, as long as it's legal and limited to people with some credentials. Which basically means either middle class white-collar migrants, or students aiming to enter that class. We cracked down hard on the lower classes of migrants workers, so now there's no one available to build houses, process poultry, nanny babies, or basically do any of the other low-wage jobs that no sane person wants to do. But instead there's millions of them here competing for scarse positions in the upper-middle class.

I guess from the point of view of Musk and other billionaires, the middle class is so far below them that he feels no threat there. For me in the middle class, I don't see much threat from the lower class, but I can see how a low-wage worker in the border states might feel more of a threat. I'd like to live in a society more like Dubai or Singapore, where we have lots of migrants workers but only for the low-wage jobs, and Americans are given a huge boost to help them enter the middle class.

In the US? Lots of people want to build houses. Nannying babies is a problem not because of lack of available work force but because taxes and regulations make it obscenely expensive. And there are indeed people available to process poultry, even though it is a thoroughly nasty job.

Define "lots of people." My understanding is that there's a lot of people with a fantasy of "someday" building their own craftsman cottage, where money is not an issue. But very few people want to go out and hang drywall to make low-cost apartments.

There's a lot of people in the construction trades. Construction tends to follow a boom-and-bust cycle where one month there will be lots of unemployed construction workers, the next there's a labor shortage, but that's different than having a very few people in the trades.

Again, I'm asking you to please use actual numbers, not just vague words like "a lot of people."

My understanding is that most people doing construction in the US, especially in the low-paid jobs, are people born in Mexico or Central America. Some came her legally, some illegally, some... who knows. The "boom and bust" is often solved by those people moving back and forth across the border. It's not going to be solved by raising wages slightly so that a recently laid-off code monkey takes a job hanging drywall.

Again, I'm asking you to please use actual numbers, not just vague words like "a lot of people."

I don't have a research agency backing me. The department of labor says there's about 8.5 million in construction and extraction, plus another million in construction managers. 2.2 million of those are construction laborers. But they don't break it down by where they're born.

As for drywallers specifically, the DoL expects demand to grow at about the average for all occupations.

Thanks. So by way of comparison, (statistica)[https://www.statista.com/statistics/193261/unadjusted-monthly-number-of-unemployed-men-in-the-us/] tells me there's a total of about 3.5 million unemployed men in the US right now. So we even if we took literally every single unemployed man and sent him to work in construction, it wouldn't massively increase the number of construction workers.

In fact, an increase of 3.5 million over a base of 9.5 million WOULD constitute a massive increase the number of construction workers. But there's also the men "not in the workforce" to be considered; prime-age male LFPR is 90% compared to 97.5% in 1955.

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