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Ok I swear I don't just get up every morning and ask, "How can I be schizo today?"
But in one day I saw the following two things:
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1731747916568727610
Among the masses of migrants flowing across the southern border each day, a whole line of Chinese nationals, military aged men, automatically standing at "parade rest" as one reply pointed out.
And this:
https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/1731808064108372245
Senator Dick Durbin making a speech in favor of allowing illegal immigrants into the military.
My schizo sense is tingling and saying that Nefarious Forces are Intentionally using the Power of Money to plan Bad Things for America.
Or, since this space has norms in favor of speaking plainly and against Darkly Hinting, let me put it more directly:
Is China bribing American politicians to allow Chinese soldiers to become American soldiers to conquer the USA via military coup?
I think the only reason the US doesn't do what it needs to do about the border is because doing what it takes to actually solve the border crisis would make America look bad in international affairs. Russia and China would have tons of propaganda pictures and stories about how horrible the US is, and the left wing press in the US would be happy to help. The empire and securing global markets is what is most important to American elites, and illegal migration just isn't a huge issue to people who can afford to live in nice areas and send their kids to good schools. The only way to stop illegal immigration would be to replace the entire US government with people that don't give a shit if securing the border makes them look bad and hurts the US's standing abroad. They'd just tell other government to fuck off if they tried criticizing them about it and jail leftists who try to stir up shit domestically. But we don't live in that world so nothing can reasonably be done about it.
The best explanation of the illegal immigration topic that I've encountered online is probably this paragraph from 2016
The political/managerial class directly benefits from illegal immigration, they're not going to do anything about it until they're forced to.
The "drive down wages" thing does not make sense, economically. When an illegal immigrant does repair work on your house, sure, he lowers the wages of a native repairman, but he also gives you a cheaper repair. When an illegal immigrant picks berries, he substitutes for a native picker, but the price of berries goes down (because food markets are quite competitive!) In order for this to make sense, 'the elites' would have to be capturing all of the value of illegals, somehow, despite the competitive marketplace. This is theoretically possible, but I don't see much evidence!
Also, to steal a left-wing argument, do you support the workers rights that illegals are supposedly undermining? Like, 15 dollar an hour minimum wage, strong unions (no right to work laws, state-mandated bargaining), etc.
I don't know, man. I used to make these arguments myself, but I don't feel like we're swimming in abundance since we let it rip with the globalism. The only class of goods I feel is more available is electronics, and maybe cars. If the price for that is the absolute gutting of manufacturing and farming jobs in my country, I'm not convinced it has been worth it.
I agree with them in spirit, I'm not convinced about them in practice.
In my experience and also (i think) the statistics, 'durable consumer goods' have gotten significantly cheaper. Definitely more slowly than in the past.
From FRED, "all employees, manufacturing" / "all employees" has been flat at 8.5% since 2000 after a fairly linear decline from 38% since 1940ish. I am very confident goods are cheaper now than they were in 1970 and 1940. This probably is just meaningless because these numbers don't mean what i'm guessing they do but durable consumer goods CPI / total CPI has dropped 43% since 2000 and 20% since 2010. So just intuitively by glancing at the graph (and this isn't a strong argument as a result, you'd want a more detailed understanding of what happened) I don't find 'less manufacturing jobs so higher prices' to be correct
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Everyone else also benefits from illegal immigration; American meat prices are artificially low because illegal immigrants staff the slaughterhouses for wages Americans won’t take. Houses are nicer than they ‘should’ be because the illegal immigrant laborers take a pay cut compared to natives. Etc, etc.
This isn’t a simple ‘business owners vs heartland workers’ story, the typical American consumer benefits from cheap labor for jobs that spoiled Americans don’t want to do anyways.
You haven't actually done anything to refute the claim that the benefits and drawbacks of illegal immigration aren't evenly distributed. I agree that these people benefit slightly from employers breaking the law and cutting down costs by hiring illegal immigrants, but the idea that those benefits actually match up to what the people in question have lost and are losing is just farcical.
Yeah, Americans don't want to work in illegal conditions that violate labour laws - this doesn't make them spoiled!
That's not what you said, you said:
This implies they drive down wages and advance the interests of employees in general. This is not true. They drive up the value of the wages of most americans, while driving down the wages harming of the interests of workers in the specific sectors immigrants work in. And in such a way that, if there were tax increases and redistribution to specific native workers, everyone would have more 'value'.
And given that, the paragraph doesn't make any sense!
(This is totally separate from IQ, culture, race, etc arguments about immigration, and doesn't disprove them at all)
No, it implies they drive down wages, as opposed to salaries. There's a clear distinction there and it actually matters for this particular topic - people on salaries BENEFIT from wage suppression, because wages are a component in the costs of services/goods that they consume. I'm more than happy to keep talking about this, but you'd probably be best served by reading the article I was quoting from first - https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-21/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-resentment/
Do you have a more data-oriented source on the economic claims here? My sense is that if immigration pushes down wages in a few specific sectors, the benefits are diffuse enough that the income for the natives in that sector decreases. But people who work for wages are >50% of the working population, so the harms in terms of lower wages from immigration aren't actually 100x as concentrated as the benefits anymore. And (poorly justified guess) this either washes out or is net beneficial because the immigrants are providing useful services and the population of wage workers isn't, like, doubling.
Also note that if we were taking in as many skilled immigrants as unskilled, this wouldn't be an effect at all - because all skill classes would increase in proportion. And ... I'm not actually sure if that's even false? If you combine illegal and hispanic immigration with the disproportionately skilled immigration from india, asian countries, etc.
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