In this time-period there has been a large-scale introduction of undocumented workers into the construction labor force. They are a quarter of some construction labor categories. Perhaps using undocumented subcontractors may play a role in lower productivity growth (cheap, unstable, and relatively unskilled labor) or maybe just distorting the statistics.
>undocumented workers [are responsible for the productivity drop]
I am confused by this assertion. If they are undocumented, wouldn't they be excluded in the stats? And if they aren't included in the stats, shouldn't we expect an artificial increase in worker productivity? If there is a 4:1 undocumented to documented ratio, then that 1 documented person will get "credit" for the work of 5 people! Even if 4 of those people are relatively unskilled, that's still a big boost.
My initial thought about this is that productivity declines because workers wait around a lot, and they wait around because of ballooning administrative overhead. This would also be consistent with what we know about state of the medical industry and academia during the same time period.
"Undocumented" means they lack citizenship or a valid visa. It doesn't mean they aren't calculated in productivity statistics. Many undocumented workers even pay taxes to the IRS, are counted in censuses, and more.
Undocumented workers show up in many statistics. "Undocumented" doesn't literally mean that there is nothing recorded about this person, it means they do not have permission to work in the US.
I'm inclined to take your side on this. By virtue of being undocumented, they should be boosting the perceived productivity, not dampening it.
If I was to steelman the idea, though; I would guess that removing incentives in the form of higher pay will lower the contributions of everyone involved?
I think I understand the question. The disagreement seems to be what "undocumented worker" here means.
If you think it means the worker is on the books, but is not a citizen, then you get to your question. It should be roughly the same.
If you think it means that the worker was off the books, regardless of citizenship, then you arrive at the other.
My consideration is if I am a cleaner and get my child to help out on a few jobs, my child will not be a documented worker and it will be a transparent boost to my productivity. Indeed, many subcontractors and migrant workers will use family as a cheap way to boost productivity so that they can take more jobs.
I grant that construction may land on the other interpretation. There are usually more rules for that kind of work. (Though, in rural areas? Not sure.)
Not necessarily. Undocumented doesn’t mean “excluded from the stats”, it means “doesn’t have a valid work visa or social security number”.
I’m not sure if something similar happens in construction, but I’ve heard that in the landscaping business a supervisor will just pull up to a Home Depot with a pickup truck, and there’ll be a bunch of people waiting around, and they’ll go “Who wants $X for Y hours?” And then 4 or 5 guys get in the back of the truck and they head to the work site.
In a situation like that, you’re probably keeping track of how many people you employ each day so you can figure out how many you need for future projects, but you’re not gonna be able to produce a list of social security numbers if someone asked.
Just speculating, but the number of people who are here legally but do not have a work permit is probably not significant in the construction business. Getting a long term visa requires so much effort and money, that it’s likely not feasible for this group of workers.
Or, "illegal immigrant" is a sometimes-used dysphemism for "undocumented immigrant". I'm not aware of any other class of people who break a law who are called "illegal" as a result; it's a rather dehumanizing impulse.
People refer to other people who break the law by the law they broke all the time.
Thieves, murders, fraudsters, etc
Illegal immigrant doesn't seem especially derogatory for someone who illegally immigrated.
I think it would be better to focus on the fact their felony crime rate is far below the native population than arguing over a pretty tame word used to describe them.
There have been plenty of people who have been in this country without appropriate paperwork historically - they were never called illegals (see above). In fact even now people make differentiations between "visa overstayers" and people who snuck across the border, even though both are technically illegal aliens.
I think you don't have to go far to see the implications.
> It's interesting to see how the language changed over time from "foreign born" to illegal immigrant depending on who was doing the immigrating:
1. you seem to be implying that during periods of "white" immigration, americans were fine but the public changed their tune when it became south american/asian. However, irish/italian immigrants also received pushback. Specifically, irish were hated because they were catholic, and itlians weren't considered white back then.
2. You can also flip this around to say that as a society, we've gotten more accurate with our wording. Rather than lumping all immigrants (legal and illegal) into one bucket, we take care to point out that we're only against the illegal type of immigration. That seems like a win to me.
The current legal immigration levels are way too low, hence people breaking the law trying to establish roots in the country (or fleeing persecution elsewhere). We used to call people foreign-born instead of illegal, and not care about their immigration status at all. Oh, wait - that's when the Europeans were immigrating: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/ann...
If many many people are breaking a law (i.e. jaywalking), one should consider whether the law is actually reasonable in the first place.
Interestingly enough many (with no claims to majority/minority numbers) "illegal"/migrant workers do have "documents" from what I've seen working in agriculture. The documents are sufficient if you don't look too closely or are not the business owner - speaking from my own experience.
These may be cases where the workers are paying taxes etc.
Not sure what kind of documents you are referring to. The I-9 form is very clear about what documents are acceptable. It is not difficult to understand if someone is legally able to work or not.
“Illegal immigrant” is a euphemism for “Illegal alien”. In law these people are called aliens not immigrants. Illegal immigrant is actually an oxymoron
I think this is one of the major impacts. My experience (family in construction) is that day labor / undocumented workers often don't have construction skills, and so have to be trained on the job, and each crew has mostly new/unskilled folks with a few skilled folks to guide them and keep them on track.
Over time, these folks become skilled, and generally end up running crews. It's very commonplace to find the more experience undocumented workers being the ones running small subcontract crews under the table with day labor, because they speak fluent Spanish.
Just speaking from my experience with a protracted remodel...
> and each crew has mostly new/unskilled folks with a few skilled folks to guide them and keep them on track.
In some cases the crew changes from day-to-day so any context a work has on a particular job isn't necessarily carried over form day-to-day. The day laborers are highly dependent on the crew chief for direction.
> It's very commonplace to find the more experience undocumented workers being the ones running small subcontract crews under the table with day labor, because they speak fluent Spanish.
This too introduces inefficiencies if that crew chief isn't present, late, or leaves the site for any reason. And often the crew chief will instruct works to do the wrong thing, or lacks the knowledge (e.g. electrical) to challenge something.
My experience (in the Bay Area) has been that regardless of country of origin, construction work is insanely inefficient. Lots of administrative bs, lots of made up rules, lack of communication between trades, tons of "not my job" attitude.
The value generated by software often scales up with organization size, while the costs and inefficiencies are unlikely to scale at the same rate.
Given that, very large successful organizations whose competitive edge is not software may still have terrifyingly low software production efficiencies.
> I'm interested where the blind-eyes are built in.
The blind eyes are built in at every single layer. I mean, it only requires a master's license to pull a permit, but master's in trades almost are never hands on, it's all journeymen, apprentices, or day labor. You as a general contractor sub out a master and his crew, and as long as the permitting happens in a timely manner and the inspection passes, you really don't care about anything else. The city doesn't care, because the master is on-site for inspection, so as long as inspection passes, they're not going down the line and asking everyone for ID or anything.
There's SO MANY blind eyes, at every layer. It's pretty much a "don't ask, don't tell" policy because if we actually started enforcing the law, nothing would get done. There are significant industries in the US that are almost entirely reliant on day labor / undocumented immigrants, construction is one of them.
I've seen some pretty dumb arguments linked here but that one takes the cake. The EPI graph isn’t measuring productivity vs. pay, even for "typical workers"; it’s measuring wage inequality. Umm yes it is a problem that wages for the vast majority of workers have stagnated; the possibility that some CEOs have done well doesn't counteract that. Also if they don't like the particular figures that "EPI" used, maybe they would prefer the Fed's research that shows exactly the same phenomenon using different data sources? [0]
Then there is some reference to Mankiw making some assumption about labor supply and demand being infinitely differentiable and continuous, as well as violating "Rule V" in the adjacent sidebar. Meanwhile the newly-constructed local Taco Bell has two employees, a closed dining room, and the drive-in queue starts on the road before the entrance to the parking lot. This is my shocked face, at Mankiw doing something dumb.
Essentially, we should not see 40 year runs of compensation lagging productivity due to some outsized returns to shareholders. That would likely reveal a structural problem in the labor market, at least by my understanding. "This would be a bad thing and our system is perfect so this accusation of badness must be wrong!" OK, Pollyanna. It would be inconvenient if the increased market concentration we see in every industry has given the remaining firms greater pricing power both as buyers of labor and inputs and sellers of products, so let's assume that didn't happen even though this graph clearly shows it.
Truth in advertising for this subreddit, it seems. Psychological commitment to the status quo yields unconvincing arguments plainly contradicted by public experience.
Do "real wages" include exec bonuses in the maths?
What about waste on MBAs?
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I have MILLIONS of square feet of FAANG builds under my belt (including healthcare, which is never included in FAANG (but now that one of the hospitals I was designer of was purchased under the Zuck's name...)) should be included.
In Manhattan or San Francisco? Probably not. But in most of the gigantic, sprawling USA, I suspect affordable housing absolutely has everything to do with cost of building a house.
Go tour some unincorporated land in the Southwest and you'll see how cheaply homes can be built. The problem is that once you're spread out enough to be able to do that, the resources required for daily living have gone up significantly because they're no longer amortized over population density and time. And surburbs/ruralish areas are just in the middle of that gradient.
Building a bunch of housing in the middle of nowhere for unhoused people isn't going to work unless you also provide them heating, utilities, transportation, etc. The least expensive way of doing that is to make it dense like a city. At which point you're just building a planned city for indigent people, which is not particularly in the purview of the US on a few axes.
In my modestly sized city nowhere near California or New York the problem has nothing to do with building costs and predates the rising costs of building materials. It has everything to do with poor city planning and a lack of building permits for middle income housing. Plenty of over priced McMansions and plenty of half occupied apartments. Not enough normal houses. So the market became irrational. People buying houses site unseen even before COVID. And property values going way up.
Another contributor to the problem was outside speculators buying residential properties. Specifically Berkshire Hathaway and Zillow come to mind. But I'm sure others were doing it too. It should be illegal.
Cities still hold a large portion of the population of the US and a lot of jobs can't just be done remotely even if employers actually adopted remote work which many really really don't want to. Housing isn't just a problem in Manhattan and SF it's hitting cities and suburbs everywhere.
Most of the places where houses are already so cheap that the price of actually building a house is a blocker for affordable housing typically have a large glut of unwanted property from population drained to other areas.
If I had to guess it's not so much the actual cost of building the house as it is the profit margin of those who are building homes. Why build a $200,000 "starter home" when you can build a $478,000 home with gigantic margin on "luxury" trim like cheap granite countertops and "hardwood" floors for roughly the same cost? And then once you get the ugly design down you can just copy and paste it with few adjustments and save even more money.
Unfortunately we have bad incentives aligned here versus stated goals.
Manhattan and San Francisco are like Japan and Argentina in economics. They're just not the same market as most places. In Manhattan in particular the value really is the land.
I am pretty sure it does. Lets assume an income of 32,000$ (~median US income) and 30% to pay for housing. That gives them 9,300$/year for a mortgage or 775$. with a 7% interest rate, that means the person would not be able to easily afford to buy a new home > 175,000$.
There are lots of levers that determine if a person can afford a home. income, interest rates, % income that goes towards housing, etc. But its obvious cost of building the home plays a factor.
In all high cost of living areas, the cost of land is the much more relevant factor. Even when people say, "oh no it's the cost of goods or the labor," they're talking about land.
Go compare the costs of identical pieces of plywood from the Home Depot on West 23rd Street in Manhattan and the Home Depot in Jersey City, directly across the river.
Manhattan: $76; Jersey City: $37
Is that the cost of shipping a piece of plywood an additional 3-10 miles? Is it taxes?
I suspect they're talking about how single family zoning results in only having more expensive places to live.
Even if you build a "cheap" single family house that's still going to be more expensive than some equally cheaply built townhomes, or apartments because of stuff like parking requirements and minimum setbacks.
Immigrant labor does not carry their own housing on their backs. It competes in the housing market for homes built by past generations of the native born.
Very true. That said, to be fair, the average poor undocumented immigrant demands far less space (simply because that's what they can get under the circumstances). Living multiple unrelated people to a room is not unusual, ie, even more cramped than college students, NYC 20 something year olds, etc.
If I am an unprincipled landlord then it may be in my best interest to change from renting to families to renting to sharers. Four working adults may be able to pay more in total than two parents supporting two children can.
Exactly. This is how immigration has totally screwed family formation and depressed birth rates for Americans. Young couples cant afford to buy or rent a home in their own city and have to either delay marriage to live with their parents or abandon their families and lifelong friends to move somewhere with lower cost of living. All so employers can go 40 years with giving workers a raise.
I had to read these comments twice, because I had assumed the "families" were the immigrants and the "four working adults" were yuppies, both in line with my own experience. It's not immigration that has screwed over family formation - it's the housing racket itself, backed up by oppressive monetary policy that sucks real wealth into the financial industry. Making home ownership into a (guaranteed) investment combined with the individualist ideal of everyone needing their own house has done the equivalent of making everyone start off life with significant debt, and the time to pay it off becomes ever longer.
It's both, at different market segments. Four yuppies (who are sometimes skilled visa-holders) sharing a higher end place, or four less well-off sharers (who are sometimes illegal migrants).
Sure, but it's a bit odd to direct focus at immigrants when it's many different market segments. If anything, immigrants are generally more willing to live poorer with traditional gender roles, having children in spite of the extractive economic conditions. It's the native born who put it off waiting for the right time.
The purpose of a state is not to bring in foreigners to replace the native population. It even rises to a low level UN definition of genocide when the native population is not allowed to express its disapproval of that policy.
The "genocide" you speak of is due the general economic policies across the board, which have nothing to do with immigration. Shoehorning the overall problem into a myopic complaint about immigration doesn't accomplish much besides neutralizing your own political stake.
birth is depressed in all developed nations, even those that experience net drain of population (aka negative immigration) for example Baltics and some Easter European countries.
Stop blaming everything on immigrants, pls. You have your own agency, dont play a victim and get your destiny in your own hands.
Immigrant labor is what keeps this country together, all those back breaking jobs that Americans consider themselves too good for and prefer sitting on the welfare/unemployment/etc - these jobs are done by immigrants while being paid peanuts.
Without immigrants the housing would be even more expensive and unaffordable, as well as all other services like plumbing, electricians, fast food/dining, hospitality, etc
>Without immigrants the housing would be even more expensive
And wages would be commensurately higher. The greatest real income increase in America happened between 1940 and 1970 when there was virtually ZERO immigration.
> Affordable housing is just a zoning issue. The cost of construction is a tiny fraction of the cost of a new house in major metros.
No it is not. Construction costs (material, labor) are sky high even if property costs are as well. Building high-end housing has always been more profitable than otherwise, low-end housing is simply high-end housing 20 or 30 years in the future.
low-end housing is simply high-end housing 20 or 30 years in the future
That was maybe true in the past, but todays exurban sheetrock palaces are impossible to be turned into low-income/entry-level housing. It starts with the zoning requirements - are you really going to divide a 2500 sqft McMansion into a duplex without an epic zoning fight? And then there's the transportation/parking issue.
The real problem is that 1200 sqft entry level housing like it was built in the decade after WW2 isn't made any longer but is urgently needed.
The new 1200sf entry level house is 2000sf. I've built quite a few of them.
It is my understanding that builders are responding to the demand from home buyers, and people that can afford a (starter) home want 2000sf at minimum.
Also the costs of a house dont scale linearly[1]. A small home costs almost as much as a 2000sf home.
> are you really going to divide a 2500 sqft McMansion into a duplex without an epic zoning fight? And then there's the transportation/parking issue.
Even in cities with little zoning requirements (like Houston, and heck, even Tokyo), you still see McMansions being built rather than low income housing. Low income housing is still old housing from the 80s/70s, and the problem you are referring to (that housing built today is not very convertible) is one for a sadder future.
> The real problem is that 1200 sqft entry level housing like it was built in the decade after WW2 isn't made any longer but is urgently needed.
Having shopped for homes in the last few years, there were plenty of 1200 SQFT options in the places I looked at, they were just $700-$800k rather than $900k-$1.1m. Condos are the more realistic options in that case (I saw one I liked for $700k with a reasonable HOA, my wife wasn't having it, however). She preferred a 900 SQF SFH over that, for reasons I couldn't figure out. All were still considered luxury however since they were almost brand new.
Note that yes, I live in an expensive area, but usually when we talk about affordable housing, we are talking about places where people want to live (vs. say Detroit).
I did say "in major metros" - new construction in SF is about $440/sqft average vs a median listing price of almost $1000/sqft (average $964).
This is the highest in the world. [1, 2]
That's got nothing on San Mateo's $1264 average sale price and $160-350 per square foot in construction costs. [2]
Outside of major metros zoning rules make houses massive, twice as big as in the 70s. While the inflation-adjusted per square foot cost has remained roughly constant since the 70s, the much bigger size makes each house far less affordable.
> new construction in SF is about $440/sqft average vs a median listing price of almost $1000/sqft (average $964).
Isn't much of the listing price related to land costs (and then of course profit)? To say that construction costs are only 50% of the sold to cost doesn't tell me much, how much did they pay for the land on a SQFT basis?
That's not even remotely true. Cost of construction is typically 60 to 80% of the cost. In high cost of living areas land is more expensive but so are construction costs.
You are wrong. For instance in Southern California the cost to build new house is around $350 per sqft. Building 2000 sqft house is around $700K. House like that may sell for around 1 million. So that would be 70% construction and 30% land.
Plus the developers need to be able to make a profit after accounting for operational expenses, closing costs, etc. If there's no financial incentive, nobody is going to build houses.
This myth of zoning being the only factor is maddening. It's almost like the California folks think their housing market is the only one. Plenty of jurisdictions have loose zoning laws and we still see skyrocketing property values. There's interest rates and inflation to consider.
The cold hard truth is: when a bunch of people all want to live in the same areas, housing is going to be expensive. There's no way around it.
I was getting quotes in that range in Denver until recently, but now I've been getting quotes for around half that. I think they were trying to keep prices up after the supply chain issues have slowly been fixed and pocket the difference, but the market is slowly becoming more sane.
I expect it to drop to below $200k here once they finish rebuilding the thousand or so homes one of our recent wildfires took out.
It's not just manual labor. You need an architect, structural engineer. Getting all permits, environmental analysis. A lot of expensive "knowledge workers" involved. Then there are materials, rental of construction equipment, insurance. Developers who build large number of row houses at the same time can get costs down through economies of scale.
In the county next to me you can self certify and pretty promise you did all that "knowledge worker" shit. No one will ever check, the self certification just promises you did the stuff and the government promises they won't investigate. Somehow not everyone is dying in city-wide house fires.
Sounds like southern california done fucked themselves with over-regulating that stuff.
It's because its used as a vehicle for bribery. See Jose Huizar the former LA city councilmember who pleaded guilty for bribery a few days ago. If its easy to get things built then no one would be paying you in paper bags of cash to get things built.
Our buildings are built to withstand earthquakes that could level other cities, because we have frequent earthquakes, and building codes were dramatically strengthened following the 1994 Northridge Quake.
A single Ritcher 5.8 quake in Virginia in 2011 caused $300 million in damage and disrupted utilities for days in 12 states. A series of earthquakes in 2019 (6.4, 5.4, and 7.1) in California caused so little damage that it's hard to find a tally. Power was knocked in some cities and restored within hours.
Yes, CA construction is more expensive. But it's also stronger and more resilient than the cheap crap in the county next to you.
Valid point. I looked up average materials cost for a 2000 sq ft house and it was estimated at $120k. Materials costs vary much less across the country than land and labor.
For 580k I could hire 2 skilled men and 3 undocumented immigrants for a year.
There's a lot wrong but a lot of it is in your assumptions. For starters there's more than 2 skilled trades that go into a house for starters. Then by hiring them yourself either you or one of those people are going to be playing project manager to make sure they don't run out of materials which is a job in and of itself if you're not familiar with it.
Hey you can play fuck fuck games all day about how 5 person years of labor, almost half of that highly skilled (I'm accounting ~150k+ all in compensation) is not enough for a cookie cutter 2000 sq ft house. I'm calling bullshit; if it really is taking that much for a McClone basic bitch house then someone is taking the piss somewhere.
I said "in major metros" - as I shared in a peer comment in SF (the highest construction costs in the world) it's about 40% and in San Mateo it's like 15-30% depending on finish.
Outside of major metros, zoning makes houses much bigger, twice as big on average as the 70s.
And building code too. There are plenty of cost-efficient designs built in Europe that can't be built here because we effectively require e.g. doubly-loaded corridors through stairwell requirements. The Europeans can put up more housing units on a smaller plot of land than we can, and for a cheaper price, because of these requirements.
There is a lot of historical evidence, that deep knowledge and long tail expertise in specific industries is carried in groups of people with a close knit subculture.
Such knowledge can also be transmitted from one subculture to another, with varying degrees of success. In order to bring in new people, one must either bring in a few beginners into a majority competent population, or have one subculture highly motivated to absorb and replicate the success of another.
This is well covered in Migrations And Cultures: A World View by Thomas Sowell.
You're going to get a lot replies nit picking this, but as a former construction PM gone software PM, I can tell you this: good skilled tradesmen are hard to find and their illegal immigrant fill ins (even the legal ones) are dangerous, do shoddy work, and will almost always delay a construction project.
Let me put it into HN terms:
It's like hiring a bunch of off shore junior devs to save money and then you wonder why the finished product is so shoddy or worse keeps failing QC. Then you have to bring in the $100/hr senior dev to clean up the mess.
Not a lot of differences between building software and well buildings.
> There are several plausible channels for labor measurement difficulties in construction, including a higher than average frequency of employees working irregular hours, contractor labor that may be misclassified by survey respondents, and, especially in more recent decades, labor supplied by undocumented workers.
It then goes on to talk about that in more detail, but I won't copy that in because every time I do, someone goes on with "but what about X?" where X is also in the very next paragraph.
Nothing wrong with coming up with the hypothesis, honestly. But the extraordinary number of responses to your comment that speculate on something that one can immediately find are just so typical of HN comments.
I sometimes see that in software engineering where some engineer will tell me about some library we're using that we have access to source code for: "yeah, I looked at the docs and it's not clear if it does A or B". But...the source code is right there. Why not just use that? At least then if the library is doing it wrong you'll know for sure.
the language barrier would definitely slow things down as well, I've seen plenty of construction sites where there directions have to be translated to Spanish and things are frequently lost in translation. Plus it prevents general brainstorming between a large chunk of the construction team who only have a 1-2 people capable of translating between the groups
I don't think this is due to illegal aliens, without which our construction industry would be in even worse shape, but rather that there have been massive declines in the competence of domestic workers across the board, and this has been hidden by outsourcing, importing skilled workers, and technological growth (e.g. have machines do things that domestic workers cannot), so that you see productivity declines in those areas where you cannot outsource and you cannot pay extreme wage premiums to attract people with basic reasoning skills.
You can see this literally everywhere. Unless you are going to pay 200K+ you will have difficulties hiring reasonably intelligent, motivated, conscientious workers.
The undocumented workers that I personally know are skilled, motivated, and diligent workers. Perhaps in part because they desperately need to hold on to this source of income. If anything, I think they would boost productivity metrics.
They hire the workers from poor countries, but hire the engineering/PM/construction mgmt talent from NL/UK and at times US... but those guys are making 6 figs while the workers are having their passports stolen.
You think that the concept of unauthorized workers coming across the border has only existed since the year 2000?
I think you're confusing the term "undocumented" or "undocumented worker" with the underlying concept that's referenced by the terms. The concept has long been in in the public spotlight using different terms ("illegal" or "illegal alien").
Ironically modern tighter boarder controls contribute to more people moving here permanently/semi-permanently. When border crossings were easier and cheaper migrant workers could come work for a harvest or several and return to Mexico or beyond during the off season only living in the US for a short period while working. Now the crossing is more expensive and dangerous so the incentive is to move here full time.
The problem you're having here is that you think "border crossings = bad", but that's not really the issue, is it? If a person doesn't live in the US, and is instead allowed to commute to/from Mexico, you get the upsides of their labor without the "downsides" of supporting them (IMO a disgusting way of thinking about it but here we are).
Considering they pay income taxes, sales taxes, social security/medicaid, and don't make much use of US resources, it seems to me that you would want border crossings to increase dramatically, as long as they're accompanied by a corresponding crossing back home at the end of the day.
...which is exactly how it was, 20ish years ago, before 9/11.
Your comment would make sense if the primary goal of our border policy was to facilitate cross-border commuting for Mexicans without work visas. If the primary goal is having control of your border (i.e. choosing who gets to come into your country, which is a basic function of competent governments) then this activity would be either prevented, or regulated via special work visas.
Either way, the idea that "tight border controls" are a contributing factor to the large number of illegal immigrants in the united states is entirely divorced from reality.
I'm confused; why isn't the idea of making something more or less legal related to how many people illegally do that thing?
They wouldn't be illegal immigrants if we didn't have "tight border controls" by definition, so it feels related and not "divorced from reality"...
We lived through this, basically all of American history up until 9/11, where the Mexican border was "loose"(er, the US committed some pretty fucked up atrocities using that border a few times in its history); it seems to me that if we returned to that level of interaction with Mexico, the vast majority of concerns raised by anti-immigration folks would be quelled.
Yep. Only in my lifetime have we attempted to limit movement across that border. But because certain media outlets use the language of war and invasion to describe the peaceful migration of people from country to country, the followers of said outlets have decided that we are, in fact, at war with these people. When in fact they're the same people who mow our lawns and wash our dishes every time we eat out. smh
> But because certain media outlets use the language of war and invasion to describe the peaceful migration of people from country to country, the followers of said outlets have decided that we are, in fact, at war with these people.
I guess pretending the issue is just some kind of Fox News conspiracy theory is easier than actually understanding it?
People use the language of "invasion" for a reason. In Texas, non-hispanic whites make up ~30% of births[0], but accounted for only 5% of the population growth[1].
You'll write that off as "muh replacement conspiracy", of course--I can tell that you've been well programmed!
Can you elaborate on what's wrong with, "In Texas, non-hispanic whites make up ~30% of births[0], but accounted for only 5% of the population growth[1]?"
I think it'd be awesome if we all had to learn Spanish in some parts of the US. What a boon for cultural diversity that would be! The exchange of ideas would be so good for our shared society.
It's more profitable to our lower classes to keep the Mexicans / Guatemalans / whatever locked up in their own country to suppress their wages and competition and then allow free trade of goods. That gets us lots of cheap shit without having to pay USA wages.
I'm in favor of open borders mostly on humanitarian grounds, and I offer our lower wage laborers as offerings on the pillar of sacrifice for that.
I don't really understand the argument for open borders as a net humanitarian good. For the individuals who come to the US, sure. But how will these countries in Middle America ever develop while their most ambitious, most hard-working, most risk-taking people are siphoned off to live (relatively) cushy lives in the USA?
Just look at what has happened to Puerto Rico. Everyone who can, leaves. What's left is grim. Easy access to the USA is a great deal for the minority who get out, but for most Puerto Ricans, it's hard to imagine that they're better off as a result.
> I'm in favor of open borders mostly on humanitarian grounds, and I offer our lower wage laborers as offerings on the pillar of sacrifice for that.
Half the country agrees with you, but they'd never admit it.
I hope those countries would adapt by competing and fixing the things that fuck up their business climate. Also worth noting if their labor flees the price of labor in their country would rise and hopefully make things better for the remainder.
I have memories of illegal immigrant workers from longer than 22 years ago and the USA has had immigration laws for much longer than 22 years. Have I misunderstood your statement?
I grew up in Southern California in the 1970s, and a non-trival percentage of the daily conversations I had with normal people had to be in Spanish, because their English was much worse than my Spanish, which was fair.
"Southern California" was/is a very, very big area. I grew up southeast of downtown.
Can you share where/when you grew up? Just curious.
As far as 'replacement': I can't dismiss such opinions out of hand, but for another anecdote: two of my great grandparents, who came from Germany in the late 19th century, lived in the US for many decades and never learned English that well.
Their children, my dad's father, of course spoke English fluently.
I guess I’m not sure I understand what’s so great about English anyway. Why not switch to Spanish, or at least adopt a more bilingual approach where it makes sense.
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