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Popping filter bubbles and picking up the Tuna Cans.
None of these stories on their own really warrant a top level post but taken together I feel like they both illustrate a trend and serve as a coda to my January post on "Tuna Cans" and how the Trump administration might be able to more effectively deliver on it's campaign promise to combat Immigration.
Last week the Trump administration announced that it would be rescinding a 2022 rule that prohibited US Customs and Immigration Services from considering an immigrant's use of Medicaid and other public benefits when deciding whether or not to renew their visa or grant them legal resident status. The usual suspects at NBC, CNN, the New York Times, Et Al are trotting out their usual tripe about "women and minorities hardest hit" but to me the most galling thing is that this rule existed in the first place, and that it wasn't quashed a year and a half ago. That said, while the best time to plant a tree (or repeal a bad law) is 20 years ago, doing it now is still something worthy of praise.
In the wake of Nick Shirley's expeditions to Minneapolis and LA, the Department of Health and Human Services has that announced that 199 million dollars a year allocated to the state of Minnesota and 860 million dollars a year allocated to the state of California has been frozen pending those states provide positive evidence that individuals and business originally slated to receive those funds actually exist and are not just a PO-box in a strip mall somewhere.
At the same time Vice President JD Vance and Interim Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced a "crack-down" on H1B visa fraud four days after Microsoft announced that it would be laying off 4,800 employees while simultaneously applying for permission to import over 2,000 foreign workers.
Meanwhile Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy continues to quietly do his job, announcing that the audit started back in January has resulted in the revocation of 28,000 commercial drivers licences and that nearly 200,000 drivers more could be effected by the reinstitution of English language proficiency requirements that had been relaxed by Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx under Obama back in 2016. The American Trucking Association is naturally angry about this complaining that the constricting workforce coupled with proposed crack-downs on "chameleon carriers" and rulings like Montgomery v. Caribe Transport is driving up costs for brokers and bulk carriers, but I think I speak for a lot of voters when I say "maybe that's a good thing".
Again I reiterate my position that more often than not it isn't the big headline grabbing stories that have the greatest impact but rather the things that happen quietly behind the scenes and that is why I feel obliged to signal-boost these sorts of stories.
Yes, because we don't need immigrants to work our jobs. We have no shortage of Americans willing to work. What we do have a shortage of are Americans who are willing to be underpaid, which is why companies love foreign labor so much. They are willing to be treated like slaves.
One wonders how one could advocate for workers' rights and treating employees fairly, and yet also support the importation of a workforce to be exploited by employers for the sole purpose of reducing costs.
Then where exactly is this mass of currently non working American citizens with no employment prospects who are perfectly happy and able to start any work again, yet alone backbreaking labor like dealing with farms in the south, and how are they currently living without any pay? The main groups out of the work force are either old, in college (and thus entering soon!), disabled, or in between employment because layover/hiring cycles means there's always some left just like how housing vacancies will (and should) always exist.
Even if we want to discuss the relatively few working age NEETs or mentally ill homeless addicts or whatever, I don't think they're gonna start picking up a hoe because you pay them a little more.
In the case that you are actually asking this question seriously, and not as a half-assed attempt at a rhetorical dunk, they're in the Appalachians. I have some family and old acquaintances in ${UNDISCLOSED}. One of the largest employers in the area has historically been a prepared food facility, which recently came under new management. This new executive team has been doing rolling waves of layoffs, and regularly furloughing workers who they retain an attempt to force them to quit. For the last year, both a relative and a friend have repeatedly noted that despite the rolling layoffs, the overall workforce at the plant has not decreased. It has, however, started to feature an increasingly large number of five foot tall Guatemalan men in their 20s who don't speak English, but present work papers claiming that they're John Billings from Madison, Wisconsin. It's agonizingly obvious that they're hiring people with stolen identities.
My cousin got laid off recently, and he's looking at trying to file some sort of suit against the company. I doubt it will go anywhere. He has placed upwards of thirty job applications in the fields of construction, municipal maintenance work, security, and HVAC. He hasn't heard a damned thing back from any of them. In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that he has a felony drug charge on his record from 20 years ago, but in that area, that's not really uncommon.
You're welcome to pretend this is all about "jobs nobody wants to do", but believe me when I tell you it's climbing up the food chain.
I know it's not the point of your post, but I just want to say that I've always found the whole "jobs nobody wants to do" argument infuriatingly obtuse and borderline offensive.
While nobody (that I am aware of) literally follows the argument up with "...and that's why the abolition of slavery was a bad thing" that is kind of what they are implying. What they are saying in effect is that people who do {dirty job} do not deserve to be compensated in such a way that someone would work {dirty job} voluntarily because {dirty job} is sub-human.
I don't think this is is quite a fair summary; the implication is that it is impossible to compensate someone enough that they will work {dirty job} - either literally impossible, or at the very least economically infeasible to do at scale.
That doesn’t really make sense though. There is always a wage people will take to do dirty jobs (I would do them instead of my profession if the dirty jobs paid better) so leaving that aside is the economy argument. Your argument is basically an argument against paying any job a high wage. Trucking simply must be done. The economy must bear whatever labor (or automation when that becomes fully viable) cost is required to make the trucks move. If that is $100/hour for entry level truckers, then goods will become more expensive and that cost will be distributed across the economy accordingly. This will make all other people in the economy poorer, and it will make truckers or whatever other dirty-job-doers richer. It would also increase the quality of talent in those positions, resulting in efficiency gains (but probably somewhat lower gains than the cost increase). I think the reality is people just don’t want to see meatpackers and truckers making significantly more than they make with an email job and a degree .
That’s how any high paid job works. Doctor is a difficult-to-fill position, and so is paid highly, which makes all other people in the economy marginally poorer by increasing their expenses. If doctors were willing to work for 20$/hour, everyone else would be better off. They don’t do that, but maybe they would if we imported 1,000,000 foreign doctors and put them to work.
What is infeasible is any one company paying high wages for dirty jobs when there is a pool of cheap labor available due to competition.
For the record it's not my argument, just my interpretation - not even much of a steelman - of those people's argument. Overall I'm very much with you on biting the bullet that all sorts of manual jobs should just be paid better, and that there is a degree of snobbery to rejecting that class of solutions to labor shortages.
That being said, I don't think we can dismiss out of hand the idea that there may be some socially-necessary jobs so unpleasant that even high salaries would not be sufficient to fill the vacancies. Historically, the question didn't really arise; some degree of coercion (whether by force, or simply by threat of starvation) was always on the table. Whether you can in fact hire sufficient quantities of sewage workers etc. in a humane, liberal, affluent society where even if you choose to remain unemployed rather than take the job, you'll get enough to eke out a living - that is not a trivial question. I'm not saying the answer is definitely no - I don't think it's no for truckers, certainly - but it's worth thinking about seriously.
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