Immigration: Paying the Price for Following the Law

[Kuciwalker]

Why are you complaining, kiwi?

[DRoseDARs]

Originally posted by Drixnak

Originally posted by DRoseDARs
Hook on Phonics didn't work for thee!

Apparently Hooked on Phonics didn't work for you either.

Our children isn't learning.

Originally posted by DRoseDARs
It's a play on words, Doddler.

Apparently, the concept of a "play on words" escapes you too.

[Caligastia]

I pay US taxes. I live here.

[Kuciwalker]

It's your own fault then.

[DRoseDARs]

[chequita guevara]

So why won't she pay illegal immigrants $15 an hour if she cares so much about the poor workers?

[Whoha]

Originally posted by Rufus T. Firefly
Of course they would. But there's an upper limit to what they will pay.

I doubt anyone hiring people to landscape their property will be hurting from not having slave wage workers available.

And as I said, consumers are only part of the equation, and The supply side is being artificially inflated by less then legal workers.

So why won't she pay illegal immigrants $15 an hour if she cares so much about the poor workers?

She wouldn't be able to as she'd be driven out of business by others who were paying less.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by Whoha


I doubt anyone hiring people to landscape their property will be hurting from not having slave wage workers available.

And that's where you'd be wrong. The home landscaping business has exploded in the last couple of decades, for a variety of reasons -- but one reason has been the fall in landscape pricing due to the influx of cheap labor (home cleaning and nanny services have exploded for teh same reasons). I'm not saying that people who use home landscaping couldn't afford to pay more -- I have no basis for evaluating that -- but I am saying they wouldn't pay more, and the evidence for it is that they didn't hire landscapers until wages fell.

Now, you can make the argument that paying living wages is the core issue here, and it should happen even if it means that illegals will be unemployed, small businesses will fold, and dads across America will again have to give their weekends over to mowing and weeding. That's a perfect valid argument, and one I'd respect though not agree with. But you just can't argue that wages for a non-essential service could be tripled (or more) without any consequences to the economics of the industry. That doesn't make sense.

[Kuciwalker]

Now, you can make the argument that paying living wages is the core issue here, and it should happen even if it means that illegals will be unemployed, small businesses will fold, and dads across America will again have to give their weekends over to mowing and weeding.

I wouldn't respect such an argument. It's stupid. It makes everyone worse off.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker

Now, you can make the argument that paying living wages is the core issue here, and it should happen even if it means that illegals will be unemployed, small businesses will fold, and dads across America will again have to give their weekends over to mowing and weeding.

I wouldn't respect such an argument. It's stupid. It makes everyone worse off.

Yep, that's why I wouldn't agree with it. I'd respect it only because it would at least have a clear principle at its root (i.e., adherence to the law is more important than economic benefit) and, if one accepts that principle, it has an internal logic. That beats the hell out of "we can just pay everyone more and there will be no consequences."

But, yeah, you and I are on the same page here.

(edited because I hate the fact that I type "teh" all the time...)

[notyoueither]

Originally posted by Rufus T. Firefly
Forget the legal/illegal stuff and assume capitalism works (a big assumption, to be sure). Here's what we learned:

The US consumer market has determined the value of landscape labor to be maybe $5/hour. A business woman who charges triple this price has trouble finding consumers. And we're surprised...why?

Oh, right, because that $5/hour figure is for illegal labor. So we get rid of the illegals. And labor costs triple -- or more than triple, since their now being pushed upward even further by a labor shortage. Do we really think there's still the same amount of work for landscapers? Econ 101 says no way. So is this businesswoman, in fact, any better off?

I applaud her quixotic desire to play by the rules in a fundamentally rigged game. But since her solution wouldn't solve the general problem anyway (which is that Americans don't want to work for the wages Americans are willing to pay), it's not of much value. Sucks for her.

All this really is is a giant advertisement for immigration reform, including amnesty and maybe a guest worker program (yes, I just agreed with Bush about something; cross that off the Armageddon Watch list). Everybody with a US job should be given legal status, immediately. If our economy wants you here, doing something legal, it's pinheaded for the government to want otherwise.

edit: Wait...she fired her foreman for feeling more attached to his home country than to a place that refused to let him become a legal immigrant, even though he had a job? And her nanny for marvelling at how much better our social services were than Brazil's? What a f*cking b*tch.

What a rant!

[Whoha]

Originally posted by Rufus T. Firefly
Now, you can make the argument that paying living wages is the core issue here, and it should happen even if it means that illegals will be unemployed, small businesses will fold, and dads across America will again have to give their weekends over to mowing and weeding. That's a perfect valid argument, and one I'd respect though not agree with. But you just can't argue that wages for a non-essential service could be tripled (or more) without any consequences to the economics of the industry. That doesn't make sense.

I am not arguing against true market conditions, I just don't think that slave labor is a true market condition. Granted Che will come in here and say that everything about Capitalism is slavery, but I prefer my free market to not have a pre-installed self destruct mechanism.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Re: Immigration: Paying the Price for Following the Law

Originally posted by Gatekeeper
Everyone:

The following is an op-ed piece I found while perusing the raw news wires.

It offers an interesting point on the immigration debate — namely, Americans who might be mouthing the platitudes about doing business only with law-abiding operations, but then not following through on them when they find out it actually takes more out of their pocketbooks in order to do so. After all, employing legal workers a living wage doesn't come cheap.

Anyway, read on and post your thoughts on the subject:



Honesty? Play by the rules? Wow. Those are such archaic concepts in today's hip, cool and oh-so-modern and partisan world. And we're damned in the end because of it.

Gatekeeper

Well, for the flip side:

Having done "landscape design" work of the type illegals do (i.e. digging irrigation line trenches in wet clayey soil and removing the excess dirt by wheelbarrow, 250-300 pound loads at a time, uphill and some distance away), I can tell you this: It sucks. Pay enough money, and you can find a few Americans gullible enough or desperate enough, to fill some of those jobs. The good news: You won't need to go to the gym, and you'll get a suntan. The bad news: Even with a "living wage," you can still make more money for a lot less work holding a cardboard sign at a busy intersection, or picking cans and plastic bottles from trashbins.

Try to can all those illegals and replace them with good, legal Americans at a "living wage", and it ain't gonna happen. There are many, many easier ways of making that kind of money or close to it. Even if you could fill the labor pool with legal Americans at $15 per hour, you're not going to get the same volume of business. A homeowner willing to pay $3,000 for a project isn't necessarily willing to pay $5,000 for the same project, even if every contractor comes in with the same price based on the same labor rate. Basic econ. People can and will do without, do it later, do it themselves, or do less to save money.

Law enforcement isn't an issue - demand is. No amount of law enforcement kept people from getting their hooch during prohibition, nor does it prevent people from getting dope now. People want cheap labor, when it comes to what they purchase. They don't want to be cheap labor when it comes to their own jobs, but that's another issue. People want the little dirty brown greasy people around as a source of that cheap labor - just not for anything else.

The issue here isn't this chick "playing by the rules" or "law enforcement" or anything more than failing to bid at a level the marketplace is willing to pay.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Doddler


Summary please, this thread is pretty pointless otherwise. Anyone can post a mangled spiel of unreadable text.

Is this Spinkies new handle? Or is there another twit of the same caliber around since 1999?

[Kuciwalker]

yes it's spink.