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Nobody derives from first principles 'ok I want a cushy retirement - so obviously the natural thing to do is to import a bunch of foreigners, many of which hate my country and burn things down and are super expensive because they don't like working and aren't very productive'... That's not a natural thought.
They don't produce wealth! How could they? The banlieues are not industrial. America's poor migrant street vendors are not the powerhouse of the US economy. America doesn't depend on Haitian workers in the meat packaging plants for US prosperity. Uber drivers and food delivery e-bike workers are not very productive, they cannot produce a surplus for boomers to skim off.
If the boomers were purely greedy, they'd prefer simpler policies like 'to make more wealth for my retirement, I'll pursue mechanization of the economy, robots and AI' or 'to ensure my house is expensive, let's restrict housing production.' There is an argument for importing people to raise house prices sure but 5 Uber drivers aren't going to raise house prices as much as one lawyer or engineer. The Uber drivers aren't buying detached houses in good areas, are they? It's technology, high end services, advanced manufacturing and finance that provides wealth that can be redistributed to the old.
Boomers might believe that mass immigration is needed to sustain their lifestyle but boomers are also relatively anti-immigration now in their old age. They voted for Brexit and Trump. Some of my boomer friends are unsettled by the demographic transformation they've seen, all the Chinese taking over certain suburbs.
Some boomers have an ideological commitment to multiculturalism and more accept the television's arguments that migration is needed to provide labour to care for them in their old age. The fundamental issue is ideological, not economic. There's never been a real economic case for mass immigration from poor countries, that doesn't make sense. The migrants get old and want pensions too! If it was just about needing labour for retirement homes, why not just import labour solely for retirement homes? No chain migration, no uber drivers or refugees pretending to be gay, just pick out care workers.
There's a teleological, ideological project of demographic transformation that then tries to justify itself economically. That's the real issue. It's like how in Britain they say 'oh mass migration is justified because of the Empire' but in Ireland they go 'Irish migrated out overseas, Ireland has always been a nation of immigrants' - these are just justifications produced afterwards.
Almost nobody who works in retirement homes, wipes old peoples asses etc is a born American citizen. If you’ve ever had elderly relatives in these places you’d know this. The reason we can’t have an American kafala system that sends the workers home after they’ve done 5 or 10 years is the fault of progressives, and birthright citizenship of course for their children. But it’s all connected. Migrants are let in for broadly economic reasons (not in every case, eg Syrians and Somalis in Sweden, but Pakistanis in England, Turks in Germany’s and most Central Americans in the US arrived to fill labor market needs) and allowed to settle for ideological ones. In the 80s, Germany tried to mass deport the Turks but concluded it would risk social unrest and was too expensive, so eventually they just gave them citizenship.
Here in the Midwest it's mostly American blacks as well as some white underclassers. Not that this detracts from your point, of course. I think it's more that if your area has an underclass, it can work in the nursing homes; if your area is too prosperous to have its own underclass, one will be imported to work in its nursing homes.
New York has a large black population but working class African Americans tend to be more likely to work in retail, food service, the DMV and government jobs, some childcare, clerical and administrative work etc.
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My mother spent her last months in a nursing home in 2011-12, and all the non-managerial, non-professional employees were recent immigrants from West Africa. Makes me wonder what the most recent year was that a care home in the DC suburbs had an all-white workforce. If ever.
I mean DC has been heavily black since 1800, maybe before, and certainly since reconstruction, so probably never.
DC, yes, but the Virginia suburbs were 95% white from 1946 through 1980 or so.
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Over the years, I've met a lot of people who were in the United States on visas for health care workers -- generally they were women from the Philippines or the West Indies. I would be interested to know (1) how many people end up staying in the US as a result of these immigration programs; and (2) how unruly these people and their descendants are. My sense is that the bringing in of healthcare workers is a very small part of the United States' third-world immigration problem, both in relative numbers and in social problems caused.
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There's an arctotherium essay on this: Mortmain Migration https://substack.com/home/post/p-215548598
Sure, there is the example of Pakistani migrants being brought in for labour in UK textile mills that you're bringing up... But it didn't work, UK textiles went downhill anyway. Bringing in the Mirpuris didn't make the UK richer or more productive, it didn't even save the industry it was supposed to save. The only way to get richer on a national level is to improve industrial organization or to mechanize.
There's no such thing as a labour market need, only an employer desire to reduce labour costs. If wages are high, that's not necessarily a bad thing for a country. It would help sustain the middle class.
I guess it depends on how one defines economic reasons.
I don’t disagree, I’m not saying the action was successful. Clearly the studies that exist on lifetime contribution show huge net losses for third world immigration. But that wasn’t the question when they were imported, or are imported, which was ‘we need cheap care workers’ or ‘we need cheap factory laborers’.
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To build on this, the term 'labour shortage' is basically an impossibility. Workers consume, thereby increasing demand for goods and services, which increases demand for labour. Filling labour shortages creates labour shortages. The term is basically just an excuse by politicians and business leaders who want to suppress wages in a particular sector (for the UK, the clear example is the massive influx of 'care workers' during the Boriswave).
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