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This reads as nonserious when we JUST had a reveal and discussion of billions with a "B" worth of dollars being fraudulently appropriated for essentially fake businesses run by various immigrant groups, with one standout being the Somalis.
Largely in blue states.
Targeting employers would ignore this particular flow of tax dollars into dubiously legal immigrant communities who have seemingly separated themselves from 'legitimate' society and operate insular networks with outsized political influence.
That seems like a pressing matter that can't be ignored.
Por qué no los dos?
I'd guess the reason we can't currently do both is the sheer amount of enforcement resources that are tied up in dealing with the active interference from protestors and state officials.
In theory, it should be simple enough to identify the largest employers with large numbers of illegals on the payrolls, throw the book at one or two of the CEOs, and let incentives take their course.
I am... very skeptical that the reason the administration isn't going after businesses is that those darn protesters are tying up too many resources, and if they all went home and localities stopped declaring themselves sanctuary cities, we'd start seeing CEOs arrested.
In theory it should be. Yet no one does this. Why?
For many years, I have heard, ironically from both open borders enthusiasts and even immigration conservatives, that we can't "really" crack down on employers because then crops would rot in the fields and restaurants and hotels would have to close. A tacit admission that we have entire sectors of the economy that are completely dependent on the existence of illegal labor.
I always found this a strange thing to admit, especially from liberals. "So... basically you want an underclass of underpaid, easily exploited labor with no real rights so your grocery bills will stay low?"
It's absolutely true that if we could magically teleport every last illegal out of the country, it would wreck a lot of the economy. In the absence of magical deportation rays, a serious effort to go after businesses depending on illegal labor would over time result in rising costs (you'd have to actually pay American citizens American wages to pick those crops and clean those hotel rooms).
I think this would be a good thing, but it seems to be a price even the so-called anti-immigrationists are not willing to pay.
So instead, what we have right now is absolute fucking theater. Does anyone think all this ICE sturm und drang is really going to result in a meaningful reduction in the number of illegals in the country? Because I'd like to check back in on that in one year, two years, and five years.
I disagree this is in conflict with the liberal (i.e. pro-illegal-immigrant wellbeing) position.
Allowing the illegal immigrant to stay in the country is clearly in their interest. No matter how bad the conditions are, we know this is a good deal for them, because their revealed preference is to stay in the country as an illegal.
They are only "underpaid" relative to a legal citizen. But the liberal isn't able to give them citizenship - so trying to get society to look the other way and let them stay is the next best thing. And ditto for exploitation.
In general I find this line of thinking - in which it constitutes "exploitation" to give someone in a really bad situation a kinda bad option - very odd. See also:
The end result of this logic seems to incentivise avoiding interacting with suffering people at all.
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I agree that not going after hotels and restaurants and farms for illegal labor is hypocrisy. But those in favor of remigration and deportations of such are not in the Trump administration: presumably, he is obliged to the business part of the coalition. This is not a happy marriage. But let it not be said that the good be the enemy of the perfect. If the current spectacle justifies building up the infrastructure so that such a future policy shift is feasible, I'm okay with it.
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Illegals do not make massively less than citizens doing the same job. They are simply willing to do jobs it is difficult to get an American labor force on, and far more reliable than the non-working class that would theoretically be doing those jobs.
The problem with that is it eliminates the price incentive to find better ways of doing those shitty low-wage jobs. No VC will invest money into a startup trying to replace sub-$10/hour migrant hotel maids with robots. At $25/hour? Suddenly that's a lot more space to capture value.
Just as an example of this dynamic, look at touchscreen ordering in fast-food restaurants and self-checkout machines. The technology had been there already for 10+ years, what made it finally hit mass adoption was the point where the marginal hourly cost of a unit and its maintenance went below the cost of a worker by a significant enough margin that stores were willing to annoy their customers for a bit as people got used to it. I'd personally rather have an economic makeup that has fewer low-wage jobs and more engineers figuring out automation rather than an underclass of serfs that are paid so poorly (yet subsidized by the taxpayer) that they are impossible to displace.
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...at what price? If you raise the price, you can likely get American labor force on it. If you don't have to raise the price massively to get American labor force on it (because illegals don't make massively less than citizens doing the same job), then it seems somewhat minor. If you do have to raise the price substantially to get American labor force on it, well then I guess we're back to potentially significant cost increases for various crops/clean hotel rooms/etc.
If one raises the price, it is not clear to what extent the people attracted to those jobs will come from the currently-non-working and to what extent it will come from folks working other jobs. You can generally get the reliability you desire by raising the price. Of course, this will compete with other job opportunities, pushing wages up more broadly and likely ending some jobs that are at the low end of value. This could increase costs for other goods/services that don't directly employ illegals now.
The open boarders economists like Bryan Caplan make the argument well that immigration restrictions have effects like ending those low value jobs, reducing overall economic efficiency and total output. I've already observed that, for example, hotels have significantly rolled back on regular room cleanings post-COVID. You could imagine effects that feel kind of like that, possibly still in combination with price increases, as the market adjusts. Some folks think the tradeoffs are worth it (and may point to various different things that are trading off, one prominent example being distributional affects purely in terms of American wages), others disagree, and well, yeah, some are probably ignorant of how they're likely to be connected.
“Rolled back regular room cleanings posts covid”
Where did our workers go between pre and post covid? The illegal immigrant surge occurred post COVID - during the Biden administration. Somehow pre-COVID we had a lot of workers. Post Covid despite a surge in supposedly illegal workers we had an accute lack of labor?
It seems like wages have doubled since Covid but we have a lack of workers. Where did everyone go?
I'm not sure whether the roll back was entirely supply-side. Hotels probably thought that consumers wanted hotel staff to stay out of their rooms during COVID. Then, different consumers likely had different preferences over time (some folks wanted to "get back to normal" very quickly, while others stayed in "pandemic mode" longer), they probably pretty rationally came up with the idea of just making room cleanings a bit more optional rather than routine. At some point, the light bulb probably flipped, and they realized they could probably save a fair amount of money by just fiddling with the default.
Even pre-COVID, it was still 'optional'. You could just put up the Do Not Disturb sign if you didn't want it. But the default was every day. More recently, I've seen defaults that are every other day or twice a week or whatever; I don't remember the details of every one. It's always been, "Don't worry, we obviously thoroughly clean for new guests, and also if you ever want a cleaning, just ask," but this allows them to skimp on costs with almost no consumer bad will. Honestly, this is probably part fluke that they just somehow didn't think of it before (or felt like they couldn't get away with deviating from the 'industry standard' until they had COVID push everyone off the equilibrium).
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If you offer six figures to work as a janitor, of course you'll get people willing to do it. But the end result of that is far fewer janitors, not janitors getting a pay raise. There simply isn't a world where general construction laborers are all making well above average salaries, although there is a world in which construction is completely unaffordable. Drywallers, hotel maids, etc are not suddenly going to be making offshore-rig wages- although there might be no drywallers or hotel maids.
This doesn’t fit a timeline with Covid. We didn’t lack workers to this extant before Covid. Now every sort of fraud seems to have taken off since Covid. Military disability surging, home health care aids surging in NYC, Somali day care fraud. Am I correct in feeling that everyone has figured out a way to get a government check without working? If we just started shutting down all these programs we would suddenly have a lot of hotel maids and janitors? I feel like UBI has already happened.
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It's probably unlikely that we'll end up with zero janitors, general construction workers, drywallers, or hotel maids. Prices find equilibria. Both supply and demand matter.
Adding illegal workers shifts the supply curve to the right; removing illegal workers shifts the supply curve to the left (at a first approximation in the linear range). Both elasticities will matter, but the only way that you can shift the supply curve to the left and not have the price rise is if the demand for janitors is almost perfectly elastic. That seems unlikely.
As I mentioned, removing illegal immigrants very likely has both the effects of increasing price and decreasing output. That is, both increasing wages and decreasing jobs. The proportion depends on elasticities as well as factors in the rest of the general equilibrium, as the market adjusts.
Nothing in anything I've said has any claims on which occupations will or will not make "well above average salaries". That will be up to the market to decide. What counts as "completely unaffordable" is also subjective, but could in theory be supported by quantitative estimates. Prices will rise; wages will rise (they are prices, after all); output will fall; jobs will fall. This is all very standard economic theory and not really contestable. Any other statements about magnitudes of effects require quantitative argumentation.
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That's just "We should maintain an arbeiter class" with extra rationalizations.
You can get people to do any job, reliably, if you pay enough. We don't want to pay enough to entice Americans to do this work. So right now, the only way we can get a reliable workforce willing to do it at acceptable wages is by importing illegal labor. If you actually want to end mass illegal immigration, you have to solve the left side of the equation somehow.
You could solve the equation from either side and get the same result. Presumably, if you remove immigrants from the equation, then either we'll have highly-paid janitors or no janitors at all. And if this is an unworkable situation, then supply of underpaid servants, sufficiently desperate for work will be increased by political means, perhaps by cutting from various social safety nets, encouraging wealth inequality to foster an indigenous servant class. We'll go back to a time where maids and butlers were feasibly affordable.
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This is a full-on guess from my side.
At the top level, its not great optics. And from the corruption angle, some don't want their donors arrested.
On the practical, ground level where the prosecutions happen:
How do you prove that a CEO was knowingly complicit in the hiring process, was directing people to hire illegals, basically fully aware that the company relied on this to function?
A number of middle manager types would probably take the fall for the guys in charge in most cases.
Its a trickier prospect than proving that someone was de facto here without permission, and thus can be summarily removed.
I think "correction" is really the term to use. That is, there's clearly a ton of 'distortions' in the economy that will be removed if immigration laws are aggressively enforced.
I have pointed out how they actively compete with working class/poor citizens for housing, and use up healthcare and similar public services, and of course if there's increased crime/decreased public cohesion, that is mostly borne by the poor and middle class as well. Over the long term I think it creates Brazilification..
I think that the benefits and costs are very unequally distributed and we get effects like cheap food on one hand but far more expensive housing, car insurance, and medical care on the other. Distortions in economic distribution due to the presence of an underclass for whom the 'normal' rules are not applied.
Teleporting them all away would, I'd wager, remove a lot of the benefits... which were disproportionately enjoyed by the elite classes... but also would remove the costs that were broadly imposed on the middle/lower classes.
So yes, there might be some 'wreckage.' I would be willing to accept the bet that the pain is mostly endured by the upper class and thus the vast majority of the populace would suffer minimally, especially after the things get reshuffled over the course of months or years.
I mean, I don't think we necessarily need to arrest the CEOs of Tyson Chicken and Walmart (though that would sure send a message). But as it stands, the Trump administration isn't willing to even make a token gesture towards recognizing the actual root cause of illegal immigration. Which makes me think they are fundamentally unserious about addressing it as a real economic/social issue and are mostly engaging in performative theater to please their base.
I would accept such an economic "correction" if they were really serious about it, even if that meant I felt some of the pain. But they won't do it.
I mean, the 'root cause' is mostly that social and economic conditions suck in other countries in both absolute terms and relative to the U.S..
In the purely materialist interpretation, its the same reason wind moves along a gradient from areas of high pressure to low pressure.
"Fixing" the root cause in that case would imply raising economic standards in those other countries (has been tried). Lowering economic standards in the U.S., or, maybe, just sprinkling enough excess U.S. wealth around that its marginally more attractive to stay put than to immigrate.
Or, if we don't find those methods feasible, imposing enough barriers that the flow is actually slowed down to a manageable extent.
And given how border crossings have slowed to a trickle with Trump in office, I'd say the barriers don't even have to be that imposing.
Anyway, lets say we do put a few CEOs in jail and this convinces other CEOs to avoid hiring illegals, which has a noticeable effect on, e.g. self-deportations.
What happens when the next Democratic president pardons them all, and then re-establishes the same status quo which allows them to hire illegals with relatively little concern for enforcement?
How do you get immigration restriction locked in at the political level?
I humbly suggest you gotta do more than merely slapping the employers around.
I don't propose we only slap employers around. I propose that if we don't address employers at all, the effort is largely wasted. Even without a future Democratic administration opening the borders again, employers who are not disincentivized will just continue to encourage illegal immigrants to replace the ones who were deported. The level of violence you'll have to inflict to really scare people out of coming is more than most Americans would stomach.
I think we disagree on which steps are both necessary and sufficient.
However I do think that punishing employers is necessary both from a practical and "upholding rule of law" perspective.
For better or worse (almost certainly worse) I think Americans are learning just how much they can stomach and how sharp but limited application of violence actually gets things done.
I think Americans have gotten less stomach for lawlessness and even basic property destruction after living through Covid times.
This isn't to say they're going to side with the government, but I see a general preference for order rather than chaos, and that can justify violent action.
(contingent on how long most Americans can actually pay attention to anything or really have an awareness of the situation outside their local area)
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Yeah, I have a hunch it's much more about lack of political will than lack of resources.
Here is a DOJ guide intended for employers to understand their obligations and responsibilities with regard to I-9 work authorization forms. I don't know what year it is from, but reading it gave me a much greater appreciation for why we ended up in this mess. Some choice quotes (emphasis mine):
There are two contradictory regulatory schemes here. One is considered more important than the other. It's basically illegal for employers to enforce immigration law.
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My abject guess:
On the top level its an optics thing.
On the rubber-meets-the-road level, good luck proving that a CEO or anyone in C-Suite was "knowingly" approving hiring of illegals, especially if the immigrants in question were able to produce sketchy but minimally sufficient papers to prove legitimacy.
Sure there's probably some who put it in an e-mail that you can uncover, but these are the guys who can afford quality legal representation.
Are the businesses hiring illegal immigrants ones that have C-suites? I would have guessed the majority are employed by small firms (potentially contracting for larger ones) as, if nothing else, plausible deniability. And I think quite a few work in cash --- residential construction, yard work, and housekeeping. Are there significant numbers in formal office jobs with tax paperwork?
I mean, any large agri-business, large construction company (which adds another layer, they work through contractors), restaurant chains etc.
That's the flip side. A lot of the employers are small businesses themselves, so there'll be a lot of them, and thus enforcement efforts are going to be a bit more involved to catch any significant number of them.
This is something you'd really want to solve on the systems level, similar to the demand for voter ID in elections.
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This emphasis is just bollocks when the fraud was out in the open and essential shut and close by 2025 if what I am reading here is correct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020s_Minnesota_fraud_scandals
Anyway, ICE can do both and should do both. Let’s round up the illegal immigrants (kindly) AND prosecute the employers that employ them (kindly). I bet that if we crunch the numbers it would also be “B” worth of dollars that employers “took” from an equivalent hypothetical American worker.
If we think of the population of illegal immigrants as the “supply” of illegal work meeting the “demand” of cheap labor then it makes sense to shut off the supply. But we can also think the “supply” of willing dollars to employ shadily/illegally is meeting the “demand” of people wanting better economic future, then it’s just as important to shutoff that supply too.
And if the state in which the persons in question reside not only refuse cooperation, but actively interfere, can we also go after the officials who are thwarting any enforcement at all?
Can we also arrest them?
I just want to know where the limits of 'accountability' stop and why it should extent to employers but not state actors.
Why not? Maybe if you go after the CEOs, the people of the state would not vote in the politicians that “helps the helpless” because clearly CEOs aren’t helpless.
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