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I find the pretense of caring about employers a sanewashing exercise, a firmer straw grasped in the sea of bad excuses of why the state is wrong to enforce borders. "Its hypocrisy!" is currently the complaint of choice because "its morally good!" got destroyed as an argument by voting populations repeatedly. The enemy is the evil white man, so every effort must be made to support those the evil white men hate, which is what sets me as a good white man away from the evil white man.
This complaint that ICE is bad is proceduralist wheelgumming. Whats the end objective of this complaint? Better ICE practices? Deporting actual criminals exclusively? Noninterference with peaceful protestors? Every wargame ends with "never deport illegals". Garcia Zarate killed a US citizen and for that he was acquited of his crimes and deported just like his previous deportations and allowed to saunter back in effortlessly. Complaining that ICE is targeting US citizens is just the latest attempt to stymie any attempt at The Bad Guys (white men) getting any win at all.
Employing illegals likely also involves financial crimes. After all, they do not have a social security number, so how are you paying social security for them? Even making sure they pay income taxes would create a paper trail most employers would likely avoid.
I would argue that the median case of illegal employment is not the woke Starbucks owner who employs an illegal out of her kindness of heart and spends as much money on him as on her legal employees.
Rather, it is some farmer or hotel owner who systematically employs illegals at wages which would not attract legal workers.
I am enough of a classical leftist to believe that freedom of contract should not be unlimited. There are cases where both parties agree to a transaction, and it is still exploitative. Sex work, selling your kidney, renting your womb, indentured servitude, or working with dangerous machines or chemicals are all fields where governments restrict the freedom of individuals to make contracts (sometimes beyond what is appropriate) with the aim to protect one party, and possibly also to protect society from the negative externalities of the transaction. (For employing illegals, these externalities certainly exist -- if an illegal working as a farmhand in Texas needs urgent medical care, the costs of that will be paid by the US society, not by him or his employer.)
I have read here the argument that tolerating illegals will create an underclass without rights which can be exploited by others, and I find it sound. Of course, the efforts of the Trump administration have not changed this situation for the better, now people being exploited in certain industries will be exempt from deportation while their exploitation continues, which gives their employers more power.
"Form a farmhand union you say? You're fired. Now watch me as I call the DHS tipline to report an illegal not employed in a Sanctuary Industry."
And Trump's abortive attempt to get rid of birthright citizenship can be best described as looking at the status of servitude and thinking "what is wrong with that is that it's not hereditary". I mean, they have not said that they have nothing against illegals as long as they know their place (working masta's fields), but from their priorities this seems to be their revealed preference. The pearl-clutching of "but the Blue cities will not enforce our immigration laws" would be a lot less pathetic if Texas enforced immigration laws consistently.
If your business can not compete with others without relying on illegal exploitation, I have zero sympathy. Sell your business, do something non-evil with your life. I am sure a lot of hard-working Americans lost their sugar cane or cotton businesses after the civil war due to increased labor costs too, and I have little sympathy for them either.
As a VITA tax prep volunteer, I strongly disagree. I have seen many illegal immigrants come to fill out their income taxes, with all of the proper tax forms, issued under false social security numbers. Their W-2's showed that their employers had withheld all the proper amounts for income tax and social security.
It's certainly possible some of their employers knew those social security numbers were false, which I assume would be against the law, but I'm sure many of their employers didn't. But either way, it wouldn't be a financial crime.
Okay, I stand corrected. It seems that I overestimated how well social security info sent by employers to federal agencies is verified. (Illegals not getting any social security benefits for their payments still sucks for them, but it hardly seems fair to blame the employer for that. I still feel that if sanctuary industries are so important that even Trump does not dare touch their illegal workers, the saner approach would be some sort of legalization (perhaps a new visa category, "can work in agriculture, etc only, visa expires after six months of unemployment", just down call it brown card).)
Under the circumstances you and @hydroacetylene described, I will retract my original statement. There is still a point to be made that employers collectively benefit from a different equilibrium of the supply demand curve, but it would be false to suggest that illegals are more exploited than their legal colleagues.
Yes, it would, and h2b’s already exist(you can basically get as many workers at regulated wages as you want if you provide housing). The reasons it isn’t a replacement for illegals probably have a lot of blame to go around.
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Being far more familiar with the blue collar labour market in areas with lots of illegals than you probably are, I can't really give a source but you'll have to take me at my word- illegals do not get lower wages than legal workers. Part of this is doing more physically demanding hazardous work, sure, but part of it is also that any part of America which attracts illegals(they are, after all, not going to rural Mississippi) has a severe labour shortage anyways. Illegals make a very similar dollar amount to legal workers doing the same jobs, although usually without healthcare, retirement, unemployment insurance, etc. This is cheaper for the employer, but not due to wages. Illegals are preferred partly because of this, but as much because they don't smoke weed every day, ask for overtime, etc. They're there to work and make money, and the employers which hire them are used to paying cash because legal workers prefer it too(can't get child support deducted that way, can spend it on drugs without having to go to a shady gas station and pay 10% to a middle easterner who mutters racial slurs while he cashes it, etc)- but the illegals' preference for cash is far more sympathetic to most people, including the mildly racist who are nonetheless disgusted at the behavior of the lower working class that competes with them for jobs. And blue collar management in the lower midwest speaks Spanish anyways.
Not getting healthcare, retirement, overtime, unemployment insurance mean their compensation package is lower. Those items are generally considered part of pay. Also, getting paid in cash to avoid taxes and wage garnishing are artificial boosts to their pay that are not available to citizens. That makes for two directions that illegal labor undercuts the citizenry, they cost less and keep more of their wages.
Considering healthcare/retirement/unemployment can easily add 40%+ on top of wages and taxes would take a 20%+ bite out of wages, someone working under the table could easily surpass the above-board worker in take-home pay despite much lower paper wages. Above board $15/hr worker + $6/hr benefits costs the employer $21/hr while the employee only takes home $12/hr. Below board $13/hr worker costs the employer $13/hr and the worker takes home $13/hr. They could hire almost twice as many below board employees or simply keep the $8/hr difference. That would be a huge negative pressure on the wages the above board employees could demand. All the while the employer could complain that no one wants to work for the $15/hr wages, so they're forced to hire below board employees even though they have a large conflict of interest in such a declaration.
Secondly, I can guarantee solve any "labor shortage" anywhere with more pay. What they have is a labor shortage at the low pay they want. That might be a sort of tautology, labor is not some worker placement with limited figurines to put in jobs, it is a function of many variables most important of which is the compensation. If burger flipping was paying more than neurosurgery, you can guarantee they would never have an empty shift. How many people are even joining the workforce is also a function of compensation. If the market sucks, they may choose unemployment, underemployment, education, retirement, gig-work, greymarket, blackmarket, welfare, homemaking, or self-employment.
Well yeah, if you were paying offshore oil rig rates you’d fill up every blue collar job- except that most of the businesses employing them would shut down.
Plenty of citizens at these jobs are getting cash, because the class of citizens they employ are ones would be subject to garnishments.
The whole thing stands out to me like an amalgam of two memes that live rent free in my head: Schitt's creek: "I cannot show you everything, David!" "Can you show me one thing?" and Simpson's: "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas."
I glance around at stores begging for employees to apply then I see their posted hourly wage to see that they are at most $0.25 above the going rate for the area while offering short hours at unusual times. I'd respect them a lot more if they actually tried raising wages and had to shutter, but instead they just muddle along until the lack of employees cascades into quality and coverage problems and the place closes with a whimper at the next shock or demand drop.
I see similar shotgun, canned openings for skilled positions in the engineering field that aren't really trying to be competitive if you look at their offered compensation, they feel more like dangling a hook hoping to get a bite from a desperate engineer they can snap up for cheap even as the engineering field as a whole supposedly has huge engineer shortages.
It can't be both a labor shortage companies desperately want to solve and also an immovable object that cannot see its budget increase. The fact that it is sold as both, to me, reads as a budget exercise to maximize profits rather than the desperate plight it is advertised as. Consequently, if it is not a desperate plight, then the off-the-book cheats they've been pursuing are in fact not necessary concessions but are instead just cheats.
Isn't this atleast partly to justify having unfillable positions that require H1Bs et all?
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