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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33061 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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Wouldn't deporting more than a certain fraction of illegal immigrants crash the US economy? US citizens are not going to want to do stuff like fruit picking, meat processing, restaurant kitchen work, and landscaping for the kind of money that illegal immigrants do it for.

Most developed countries don’t have 15 million+ illegal immigrants - what happens in those countries? I imagine the same would happen in America.

Groceries and restaurants cost dramatically more and there’s far fewer nicely landscaped grounds.

Nah, you have seasonal workers.

Yes, US citizens are not going to want to do that stuff for below minimum wage and without the workplace and labour protections that they have fought for over the years. If nobody is willing to do those jobs for even the minimum wage, then those jobs either don't need doing or deserve higher wages - I personally think that this would actually be a positive change in the long-run, even if there were a few growing pains early on.

I mean, the actual issue is, for some of those jobs, you actually have to pay more than other jobs that are actually more skilled. If you give somebody an option between making say, $15 at an Amazon warehouse, $13 working at a Starbucks, or $20 working doing fruit picking, a lot of people will pick option A, and some will still pick option B.

You could still have foreigners do it, just don't let them stay. Have a work visa where 75% of your pay is held in an account and gets paid out when you leave the country. If you over stay it's forfeit.

I’m not really trying to argue for the merits of these ideas- but that they are major issues the various factions of the online right care about, mostly agree on, and are theoretically possible through normal politics.

US citizens are not going to want to do stuff like fruit picking, meat processing, restaurant kitchen work, and landscaping for the kind of money that illegal immigrants do it for.

Other countries without substantial illegal immigrant populations seem to manage just fine. But yes, wages for those jobs would surely go up, and consumer prices along with it.

Robotics and AI would probably solve that problem within the next two decades

Fruit picking and meat processing seem extremely difficult to automate.

In the US due to economics. Meat processing in Europe is more automated.

deleted

Lower labor costs in the US dissuade increased investment in automation.

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