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Privateer
Joined: 31 Aug 2005
Location: Easy Street.
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 Posted: Tue Apr 02, 2013 10:06 pm Post subject: |
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| bigverne wrote: |
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| If you can provide any studies, statistics, etc that show illegal immigrants take away jobs from us citizens, that would be great. |
Increasing the supply of low-skilled labour pushes down wages for working-class Americans. The laws of supply and demand seem to vanish whenever people start discussing immigration. Mass immigration is good for rich people and large corporations. It's bad for almost everyone else. |
Therefore giving legal status - and concomitantly wage protection - to illegal aliens would push the wages of working class Americans up. |
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Privateer
Joined: 31 Aug 2005
Location: Easy Street.
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| Posted: Tue Apr 02, 2013 10:10 pm Post subject: |
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| bigverne wrote: |
I will try and read those reports when I have the time.
One point I will make is that from the end of WW2 until the 1970s, the USA saw very large real wage gains. This was also a time when immigration was largely restricted and before NAFTA and the suicidal offshoring of jobs to China and elsewhere. Since the 1970s, median wages have stagnated, while the rich have become increasingly more wealthy. At the same time, immigration, both legal and illegal, has massively increased. |
This is not an unintended consequence of short-sighted immigration policies but an intended consequence of long-term policy-making in favour of big business. |
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bigverne
Joined: 12 May 2004
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| Posted: Tue Apr 02, 2013 10:52 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| Therefore giving legal status - and concomitantly wage protection - to illegal aliens would push the wages of working class Americans up. |
More likely it would depress wages in those industries not already totally awash in illegal labor. |
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Titus
Joined: 19 May 2012
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| Posted: Fri Apr 05, 2013 6:34 pm Post subject: |
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| Privateer wrote: |
| Therefore giving legal status - and concomitantly wage protection - to illegal aliens would push the wages of working class Americans up. |
A completely idiotic opinion.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-04-05/people-not-labor-force-soar-663000-90-million-labor-force-participation-rate-1979-le
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| The best manifestation of this: the number of people not in the labor force which in March soared by a massive 663,000 to a record 90 million Americans who are no longer even looking for work. |
Yes. This is an economy that needs a larger labor force.
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| There are not 12 million unauthorized in the country now. |
There are probably more.
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| And immigration is no longer just Hispanic-origin. |
So what.
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| Furthermore, immigration enforcement has become aggressive. |
No, it hasn't.
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| Furthermore, the border is more secure than ever before. |
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/04/01/Illegal-Border-Crossings-More-Than-Double-Since-Amnesty-Talks-Started
No. It isn't.
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| What else you got? Lets leave the bigotry aside in this thread and focus on facts, shall we. |
The facts are, Kuros, that the government is importing a new citizenry. They believe it will be more docile and will work for cheaper. Additionally, immigration will turn the country into a one party state at the federal level. California for all. That's what I got. Extrapolating trends into the future to understand what the future will look like. |
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GF
Joined: 26 Sep 2012
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| Posted: Sat Apr 06, 2013 7:44 am Post subject: |
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| Titus wrote: |
| The facts are, Kuros, that the government is importing a new citizenry. |
Is? Already has. This is the final touch.
Peter Hitchens wrote recently, with respect to the UK:
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When I was a Revolutionary Marxist, we were all in favour of as much immigration as possible.
It wasn't because we liked immigrants, but because we didn't like Britain. We saw immigrants - from anywhere - as allies against the staid, settled, conservative society that our country still was at the end of the Sixties.
Also, we liked to feel oh, so superior to the bewildered people - usually in the poorest parts of Britain - who found their neighbourhoods suddenly transformed into supposedly 'vibrant communities'.
If they dared to express the mildest objections, we called them bigots.
Revolutionary students didn't come from such 'vibrant' areas (we came, as far as I could tell, mostly from Surrey and the nicer parts of London).
We might live in 'vibrant' places for a few (usually squalid) years, amid unmown lawns and overflowing dustbins.
But we did so as irresponsible, childless transients - not as homeowners, or as parents of school-age children, or as old people hoping for a bit of serenity at the ends of their lives.
When we graduated and began to earn serious money, we generally headed for expensive London enclaves and became extremely choosy about where our children went to school, a choice we happily denied the urban poor, the ones we sneered at as 'racists'.
What did we know, or care, of the great silent revolution which even then was beginning to transform the lives of the British poor?
To us, it meant patriotism and tradition could always be derided as 'racist'.
And it also meant cheap servants for the rich new middle-class, for the first time since 1939, as well as cheap restaurants and - later on - cheap builders and plumbers working off the books.
It wasn't our wages that were depressed, or our work that was priced out of the market. Immigrants didn't do the sort of jobs we did.
They were no threat to us.
The only threat might have come from the aggrieved British people, but we could always stifle their protests by suggesting that they were modern-day fascists.
I have learned since what a spiteful, self-righteous, snobbish and arrogant person I was (and most of my revolutionary comrades were, too). |
Better late than never. As a 'reformed' liberal, he has good insights.
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/mass-immigration/ |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Sat Apr 06, 2013 9:46 am Post subject: |
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| Titus wrote: |
The facts are, Kuros, that the government is importing a new citizenry. They believe it will be more docile and will work for cheaper. Additionally, immigration will turn the country into a one party state at the federal level. California for all. That's what I got. Extrapolating trends into the future to understand what the future will look like. |
The unauthorized immigrant population has leveled off. Extrapolate this. And this.
Make sure to factor in the general trend for the U.S. population.
Let us get back to real problems now. |
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Privateer
Joined: 31 Aug 2005
Location: Easy Street.
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| Posted: Mon Apr 08, 2013 10:13 pm Post subject: |
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| bigverne wrote: |
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| Therefore giving legal status - and concomitantly wage protection - to illegal aliens would push the wages of working class Americans up. |
More likely it would depress wages in those industries not already totally awash in illegal labor. |
How so? If all workers were given legal status, employers would have to pay them at least minimum wage and generally treat them better. Conversely, when there is a pool of illegal immigrant workers to draw upon, employers can use the threat of replacement to force all workers, including legal ones, to put up with worse conditions and lower wages. They use the existence of low-waged workers in China in a similar way, as an instrument of class war, by threatening to move production over there.
It might be better for legal workers altogether if illegal immigrant workers were prevented from joining the workforce, but imposing more inhumane penalties on these workers is not going to achieve that. The most efficient way would be to penalize the employers who hire illegals. This is not done, and a significant part of US agribiz depends on hiring them. I suggest that US agribiz likes it that way, and that stiffer penalties for illegal immigrants is just another way of imposing greater work discipline on them, not restricting their numbers.
If you're going to punish people for working illegally, then, at least, for the sake of fairness, punish people for hiring workers illegally too. And if that's unworkable due to the needs of the agricultural sector, then maybe (!!) the whole sector needs reform.
If this opinion is 'idiotic' (according to Titus), explain why.
Perhaps you're talking about other industrial sectors, where increased competition in the labour market might drive wages down. That's not the case in the agricultural sector anyway. There are also those who say that US workers simply will not do the jobs illegal immigrants do in agriculture; those are tough jobs, that no one wants to do any more. If that's true, and the country as a whole is dependent on bringing in workers from abroad to do essential work, then that's all the more reason to treat them decently. |
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bigverne
Joined: 12 May 2004
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| Posted: Fri Apr 12, 2013 12:27 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| If all workers were given legal status, employers would have to pay them at least minimum wage and generally treat them better. |
The flipside to this though is that if the supply of labour is tight (as it would be if immigration was much stricter), employers would in many cases have to pay far higher wages than they currently do. God forbid, they might have to put up with lower profit margins, but we can't have that can we?
Anyway, why should working class Americans have to deal with more competition for an ever decreasing number of jobs? |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Fri Apr 26, 2013 7:16 pm Post subject: |
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Day-old Sushi Moves the Market
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Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world's largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.
Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It's about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.
It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks � including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland � that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. |
. . .
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Famously, one Barclays trader monkeyed with Libor submissions in exchange for a bottle of Bollinger champagne, but in some cases, it was even lamer than that. This is from an exchange between a trader and a Libor submitter at the Royal Bank of Scotland:
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SWISS FRANC TRADER: can u put 6m swiss libor in low pls?...
PRIMARY SUBMITTER: Whats it worth
SWSISS FRANC TRADER: ive got some sushi rolls from yesterday?...
PRIMARY SUBMITTER: ok low 6m, just for u
SWISS FRANC TRADER: wooooooohooooooo. . . thatd be awesome |
Screwing around with world interest rates that affect billions of people in exchange for day-old sushi � it's hard to imagine an image that better captures the moral insanity of the modern financial-services sector. |
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Titus
Joined: 19 May 2012
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| Posted: Sat Apr 27, 2013 9:19 am Post subject: |
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| Kuros, don't worry, democracy and the law will fix this up straight-away. Have faith! |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Sat Apr 27, 2013 3:10 pm Post subject: |
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| Titus wrote: |
| Kuros, don't worry, democracy and the law will fix this up straight-away. Have faith! |
A gigantic 'meh' to this. I don't know upon what basis you represent my position as thus.
I do not seek salvation in some right-wing revolutionary fantasies, though. |
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Titus
Joined: 19 May 2012
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| Posted: Sat Apr 27, 2013 7:11 pm Post subject: |
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| Then there will be no improvement. A slow grind of consolidating oligopoly and decaying society. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Sat Apr 27, 2013 7:17 pm Post subject: |
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| Titus wrote: |
| Then there will be no improvement. A slow grind of consolidating oligopoly and decaying society. |
I do not know how long it will take. I predict that once the first bankster is jailed, then we will be halfway there.
The United States has been here once before, and Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressives turned it around. But there was a very long spell of oligopoly before that happened. This time, the criminality is international in scope, but once a major power makes a breakthrough the others will follow. |
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Titus
Joined: 19 May 2012
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Sat Apr 27, 2013 8:35 pm Post subject: |
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Americans enjoy the housing-industrial complex, but those that do are stupid.
Its upper-class welfare. The mortgage-interest deduction is a pittance to the middle-class and keeps many fools from paying off their mortgage. They also refrain from becoming true owners because of the low costs of mortgage loans, which everyone pays for through Fannie and Freddie.
People need to realize the many ways in which banks fleece this country. Every time there is a foreclosure on a consumer-owned property, the property will sell at distressed rates. In many cases, the bank will bid on its own property. Since over 95% of residential loans are insured by the government, these banks will recover whatever they asked for in their complaint. Often this amount exceeds the principal.
For this reason, banks will push people into foreclosure even when they desire a loan modification or workout. They have no reason to care. |
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