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‘Two years of lost immigration’ is responsible for half of missing workforce

washingtonpost.com

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Re: ‘Two years of lost immigration’ is responsible for half of missing workforce

#101

Post by astrange »

graevy wrote: post #90
astrange wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US real median household income is 55% higher in 2019 than 1990. https://twitter.com/MichaelRStrain/status/160341481147113472...

your source, some guy on twitter from the "american enterprise institute" marketing his book "the american dream is not dead", is cherrypicking from the low to high points of the business cycle: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N from a dataset which actually tracks data outside that range: https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2022-11/58353-HouseholdInco... a more robust dataset, which you would get by simp…

The difference is mainly that the number I linked is "after taxes and transfers".

Also surely 2019 is not the peak of the business cycle? Feb 2020 is.

Peak-to-now real income is up for bottom 50% of households since then (https://realtimeinequality.org/?id=income&incomeend=09012022...) but flat for the rest due to inflation.

Re: ‘Two years of lost immigration’ is responsible for half of missing workforce

#102

Post by midoridensha »

odysseus wrote: post #46
bibanez wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see any systems in place for raising 60 million unwanted children. Would you be able to raise any yourself? There's a gap between understanding the numbers and practice.

That's 60 million children missing over almost 50 years, or ~830K/year. But not all of these were "unwanted". Many women are pressured into abortion by abusive, manipulative, cowardly, and responsibility-shirking men. As for the truly unwanted ones, ~33 million couples in the U.S. are infertile. There are untold thousands of families waiting to adopt. A few of them are listed at https://www.americanadoptions.com/fami…

>But not all of these were "unwanted". Many women are pressured into abortion by abusive, manipulative, cowardly, and responsibility-shirking men.

So if they didn't abort, how exactly were these children going to be raised? By homeless single mothers now that the cowardly, responsibility-shirking men have left them?

You seem to think that preventing abortion will magically turn accidental parents into good parents.

>We'll never know how many diseases would have been cured by now

We'll also never know how many people who made big contributions would have been murdered by unwanted, abused, and neglected children who grew up to become criminals.

Re: ‘Two years of lost immigration’ is responsible for half of missing workforce

#103

Post by dontlaugh »

barry-cotter wrote: post #91
Blackthorn wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Neoliberals are very pro-immigration. Is this really the case? My experience with neoliberalism is they are certainly pro-globalism, but would be quite happy physically keeping everyone where they currently are (all the better to exploit the wage gaps).

Do you have any concept of how much more productive people are in developed countries than undeveloped? Unskilled labour in the US gets paid a lot more than ten times what it does in Haiti. Investing in the third world is what you do because you can’t get labour in places you already know too do business in, where you’d want to live.

Wage differences for the same job have almost nothing to do with productivity and almost everything to do with the rate of exploitation.

Re: ‘Two years of lost immigration’ is responsible for half of missing workforce

#104

Post by barry-cotter »

dontlaugh wrote: post #103
barry-cotter wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any concept of how much more productive people are in developed countries than undeveloped? Unskilled labour in the US gets paid a lot more than ten times what it does in Haiti. Investing in the third world is what you do because you can’t get labour in places you already know too do business in, where you’d want to live.

Wage differences for the same job have almost nothing to do with productivity and almost everything to do with the rate of exploitation.

How is this supposed to work? There’s an awful lot to exploit in Ireland or the US and pretty much nothing in Cuba, even less in Haiti. In between in Vietnam, Thailand or China. Is your model that the Irish/US elites are more benevolent and Vietnamese ones less?

Re: ‘Two years of lost immigration’ is responsible for half of missing workforce

#105

Post by dontlaugh »

barry-cotter wrote: post #104
dontlaugh wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wage differences for the same job have almost nothing to do with productivity and almost everything to do with the rate of exploitation.

How is this supposed to work? There’s an awful lot to exploit in Ireland or the US and pretty much nothing in Cuba, even less in Haiti. In between in Vietnam, Thailand or China. Is your model that the Irish/US elites are more benevolent and Vietnamese ones less?

Workers in Germany, Romanian and Vietnam doing the same job at similar productivity are paid very different wages. You can see this quite clearly in German companies that open factories in poorer countries to extract higher profits.

Capitalists pay the lowest wages they can get away with. While they exploit all workers (by appropriating as profits much of the value created by those workers), they exploit the workers in the poorer countries far more than those in the rich countries.

They can get away with this largely because the poor countries are underdeveloped (and are often kept that way on purpose). Workers in those countries have fewer options, thus can be exploited more.

Re: ‘Two years of lost immigration’ is responsible for half of missing workforce

#106

Post by j-bos »

ido wrote: post #64
j-bos wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it is a myth with no basis. That said, increased supply decreasing demand is usually the null case, yes? So I'd want to see evidence that additional workers do not supress wages.

Basically what you're asking for is protectionism. How is it different than putting tariffs on Japanese cars to make american cars less uncompetitive?

I made no argument on any decision, only on a means to answer a specific question of measurement.

Re: ‘Two years of lost immigration’ is responsible for half of missing workforce

#107

Post by bobosha »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #86
bobosha wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The sad fact is that we have enough software developers in America to fully meet all of every American companies technical needs; The problem is that these companies don't want to meet the market demands of that labor pool by paying what that market is asking to keep that sustainable, so they want to import people who they can abuse to temporarily lower labor prices for them. This is a bogus self-serving argument th…

In my view you are both wrong for different reasons. There are not “enough software developers in America to fully meet all of every American companies technical needs”. There is virtually no unemployment among competent software developers and almost every team I have ever talked to consistently struggles to hire. It doesn’t pass the sniff test, as there are relatively few of these workers in any case. Equally, work…

ty. I think you made my point more eloquently than I could. Agreed that h1b has _several_ flaws, but then so has SS, Medicare/Medicaid, VA etc. Those aren't shining examples of good governance either. All its flaws notwithstanding, quite a lot of good comes out of h1b - the number of foreign born CEOs and entrepreneurs in tech is telling. I'd go so far as to say, no other program has done more to keep America competitive in tech than h1b.

There's widespread support in business for reform. Many of us are supportive of a points scheme for visas using salary indexed to COL, academic credentials etc as a better filter. Unfortunately congressional gridlock makes it extremely unlikely.

My objection was to the smug, sneery condescension about "cheap labor","wage suppression","no shortage if you pay enough". IMO it's driven in large part by racism and nativism coupled with self-serving avarice (delicious irony there) - not "wage concerns" or "h1b worker exploitation". That's the BS cover story!

Re: ‘Two years of lost immigration’ is responsible for half of missing workforce

#108

Post by bryanlarsen »

feet wrote: post #38
ElevenLathe wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true rhetorically (the favorite specific topic being the "dreamers"), but there is no will to fix the H1B program at all by Democratic leadership. The status quo is great for businesses, a big part of their power base. It's not even bad for support from organized labor (though that matters less and less in real elections as union membership has been in decline for decades), since H1Bs are largely employed in n…

It's bigger than that, democrats currently just cry about how bad the Republicans are to get votes and donations then when they're in office they do nothing to fix anything.

Take a look at Biden's 2020 platform. It's relatively broad, specific and actionable. And then look at his attempts to get it passed. First he had to throw out anything that couldn't be passed through reconciliation. Then he had to significantly water down even the reconciliation bills due to the DINO's Manchin and Sinema. And he also had to fight with a conservative court. And yet despite all that he managed to pass several major bills.

Re: ‘Two years of lost immigration’ is responsible for half of missing workforce

#109

Post by jjulius »

Gh0stRAT wrote: post #72
odysseus wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's 60 million children missing over almost 50 years, or ~830K/year. But not all of these were "unwanted". Many women are pressured into abortion by abusive, manipulative, cowardly, and responsibility-shirking men. As for the truly unwanted ones, ~33 million couples in the U.S. are infertile. There are untold thousands of families waiting to adopt. A few of them are listed at https://www.americanadoptions.com/fami…

I mean, if we're talking about what might've been then there are easily a hundred million lives lost each year to menstrual cycles in the US alone. Just gone. Think of how many Einsteins, Mozarts, and Davincis have already been lost to us! Abortion is ^This may sound ridiculous (I certainly think it does) but I think contrasting it with your post is a good thought experiment. Can you see any meaningful difference bet…

I don't know how I've not come across this specific argument/perspective in this conversation before. I'm stealing this for the future, thank you. :)

Re: ‘Two years of lost immigration’ is responsible for half of missing workforce

#110

Post by joenot443 »

Ekaros wrote: post #95
cat_plus_plus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You guys have no clue about US immigration system. There are equal green card quotas for each country, which is the main merit path to citizenship. Of course some countries have a huge population or huge demand for US visas, but that still means that green cards for that country are equal in number to green cards from other countries. And for example, there are a lot of countries in Africa. On the other hand, childre…

For small European country. I remember one my co-workers. He used to work in USA for some years, got green cards for himself and family, I think in months. Then returned here and simply just returned those cards. The system truly isn't equal. And from outside is bit bizare.

I think when you have a country which many more people want to live in than it can realistically sustain, you're bound to end up with a system which isn't equal. It's like a game of musical chairs with 500 people and 5 chairs.

The US has 50m foreign-born residents, the second highest is Germany at 16m. There's no country on Earth which takes in more immigrants (I'm actually one of them!) yet my whole life I've seen nothing but people demanding that they take in even more.

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