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While the US becoming minority-White might be an added bonus for plenty of establishment democrats with a lot of sway over US immigration policy, the federal government doesn't have the state capacity to deport 10 million people and it won't for the foreseeable future. Nor does it have the state capacity to consistently enforce labor laws for natives, who are better tracked. There's also no good replacement for illegal labor in the US economy; absent migrants working below market wages in jobs no-one else not on probation is willing to take food prices would skyrocket and absent illegals working 12 hour days construction would get even slower and more difficult. This is politically untenable so no one wants to do it.
Now the US can do a lot to slow the tide(like cracking down on sanctuary cities), but it's not just that we can't deport 11 million people, it's that we don't really know how to run a society without them. They do a lot of important jobs Americans refuse to and that's a travesty, but no one knows how to fix it.
You can confiscate the wealth of illegal aliens to fund sending them back. You can implement work ID laws that incentivize migrants to take a ticket back to the US. You can trawl social media etc to find the communities comprised of mostly illegal migrants. You can fine businesses who use illegal labor.
Food prices would only increase as a proportion of income for the already wealthy; the lower class will now find significantly more demand for their labor and can pick and choose which businesses to work for to maximize their quality of life. (We saw this happen with the peasants after the black plague in Europe; fewer peasants = more demand for their labor = a natural wealth redistribution from the wealthy to the poor). They would make more money than the price of food increases. The eradication of remittance payments means more funds in US economy. Would be enormously beneficial for the lower and middle class and really only hurt the very wealthy white collar workers who are far removed from the economic competition of lower/middle class.
Who's going to pick fruit and work in slaughterhouses, hmm? I suppose you can use prison labor, but it's not like there's a bottomless well of that either and it's not well-distributed or trustworthy enough.
The poor can go back to eating rice and beans, I guess. But there isn't a scenario where meat and fruits and vegetables prices rise lower than the wages of the american poor and working class. That's assuming the wages of nativeborn workers go up very much at all; illegals mostly work in different industries(eg fruit picking) than the native poor.
Who does that in Japan? Who does it in Iceland (well they don’t have fruit, but slaughter houses apply)? Millions would be happy to do these jobs once the pay rises, just like you have dudes doing underwater welding. And the pay will rise in the absence of a pseudo slave labor class.
Sure there is. All of the increase in payment to “food companies” due to the rise in food prices is going to the lower class employee base (who need the money more), yet this increase in payment is paid for by everyone (lower-to-highest classes), meaning you necessarily see a transfer of wealth from upper to lower class; and on top of this, the increased cost of food for the wealthy makes prices more salient, leading to more cost-saving consumer practices which winds up enforcing more competition among food-related businesses.
It's not slave labor when someone voluntarily sells their time at a rate you don't like. It's not even pseudo slave labor.
It’s not slave labor, and it’s also not “not genuine” slave labor? That’s what pseudo means. The simplified point is that, just like slave labor is great for the wealthy employers but bad for the non-slave wage competitor, so is it bad when you import a class of people who are practically economic serfs within a given industry: no hope of ever obtaining a better position because of the language barrier / citizenship barrier / possibly no degree at all even in Mexico/Honduras/etc.
Actual slave wages are zero. People talking about "slave wages" are simply trying to use the negative affect of "slavery" (or "serfdom") to tar something that's entirely unlike slavery rather than argue against it on the merits.
There are people who will probably work low level jobs their entire life, yes. Some of them are (illegal) immigrants. Maybe this is bad, but I can't see how it's bad because they agreed on a wage you don't like. These people are free to go home if they don't like their conditions (and in fact some of them do).
For a practical discussion on the effect of wage depreciation on the lower and lower middle class, I fail to see a substantive difference between “these people signed up to work because they live in extreme poverty and so will labor for almost nothing”, and “these people genuinely work for nothing but room and board and food.” In both cases it is horrible for domestic workers who do not and cannot live like a Honduran who sends home remittance payments. Calling it pseudo slavery is no less manipulative than the economists’ misuse of the terms “efficiency”, “free market”, “low costs”, etc.
We can only hope one day the Indians become trained enough that we can completely replace our domestic economists with Indian-born workers. This would be highly efficient.
The mistake you're making is that "slavery" isn't about the effects on low class wages. It's about an involuntary labor arrangement. Just because you don't like something doesn't make it slavery.
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