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Notes -
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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