I am a 69 y.o. woman, retired from my landscape business, but still serving a few clients and doing habitat design. Yesterday, I was working with another good local contractor (hard to find these days, as grass cutters are not landscapers) to whom I want to turn over to care for a beloved client and I worked with his three Hispanic workers who I was training to recognize and be aware of the various emerging plantings. These three guys not only absorbed what I demonstrated to them, but worked circles around me, and were polite, thorough, and an absolute delight to work with. Over the years, I have met and worked with people from Mexico, Peru, and various parts of South and Central America. These folks have been human benchmarks in my life, demonstrating kindness, love of family, a work ethic not seen much in the US these days, and their good cheer, amidst all the humiliating treatment doled out to them by supposedly Christian Americans.
Immigrants feed America. Almost everything we eat is planted, picked, or processed by immigrants.
Americans have forgotten where they came from, and are fools for treating these primarily good folks like criminals.
The idea is to let in legal immigrants who have full status and are not taken advantage of. For decades undocumented workers were exploited by unethical employers (I saw it all the time). We should allow a diverse set of people into the US from all over the world. That works. What we cannot do is allow random people to enter the country without background checks (what we are doing now). It is especially grating when programs exist, but employers complain because they do not want to pay market wages or provide benefits. They prefer to bank the fruits of migrant labor and let the externalities fall on local communities.
We can and should have a lot of immigration, but it must be legal. There are so many people who want to come here. It is the height of stupidity to take in random people at the border while refusing entry to so many around the world. My wife's brother wants to come here and he has been denied twice (after enormous fees!). It sickens me that thugs can just cross at the border. We are bringing in exactly the wrong sort (Venezuelan toughs, Central American gangsters,...). There is an easy alternative (start approving more visas!). I personally know a dozen people in Africa who want to move here, all of them university educated. Why must they wait while anyone can walk across the border?
Claire's most important point: "Create simple, legal pathways..." That's what conservatives don't seem to understand. We can't just declare something legal or illegal. First, a correct way to do things must be established and all the apparatuses for doing things correctly must be put into place.
From the Boston Globe, March 19th, reporting on the public reactions at town meetings to the dramatic influx in “newcomers” crossing the southern border:
“(The) state’s emergency shelter system ….is expected to spend about $1 billion this fiscal year to shelter roughly 7,500 families.”
Do the math. If I got the zeros right, that’s $133,000 per family. How does that work?
It could be the Globe’s facts are wrong, or it could be the state’s shelter system is extremely inefficient. But assuming the Globe’s numbers are correct how do you think spending $133,000 per migrant family goes down in a very blue state where the median family income is just shy of $90,000 and the average is ~ $65,000?
It may not be MAGA republicans who are raising the temperature in town meetings.
Over 40 years ago, I spent 2 years giving visas to people in Ireland heading for the US. A part of the routine on a fairly regular schedule was processing a batch of special visas for newly graduated nurses from schools in Ireland who were heading for jobs in the US (rather than perhaps working for the National Health System in the UK or working in Ireland?). Their appearance at my office reflected the academic calendar and each batch were heading collectively to a specific US area though always different from the area previously named. My mother and several school friends were working as nurses and I personally knew that they were needed, though the final say was never mine but the Department of Labor in the US. Ironically, musicians were supposed to use the same visas and application system but routinely traveled and then performed on regular tourist visas - and apparently no one objected except just possibly an extremely alert immigration officer at the port of entry.
The possible malevolent view of "All the economic growth is coming from immigrants" is "Lower-skilled native-born Americans are not getting these jobs for one reason or another including location and ability to demand higher quality jobs"
Given the extremely low rate of unemployment and the fact that low-wage earners are reaping a disproportionate share of income gains over the past four years (https://x.com/JustinWolfers/status/1771006832091545947?s=20), that dog won't hunt.
* Am absolutely being devil's advocate here but civilian labor force participation rate has still not come back from the pandemic something something *
Yes. Trump locking the border helped the poorest Americans. I hate that orange fluff bag, but his stupid policy actually helped poor Americans, many of whom are immigrants. Most people pushing for mass migration employ people at rock bottom wages. They will do anything to maintain their $8 per hour workforce, but that only helps dirtbags who enjoy sticking it to their workers. I personally would love to offer visas to everyone who has a PhD in economics, engineering and / or hard science. There is no reason to not let all of them stay. I would do the same with US university graduates. That would be a great pool of labor and it would provide a controlled path. Instead we keep denying visas to so many people, then we open the border without background checks. It is madness. The only people who win from this are right wing demagogues and minimum wage-paying corporations.
"Create simple, legal pathways for people without criminal records to work." the devil is always in the details and in this case the methodologies and applications of the state's role in helping to provide for the common good. It "ain't happening right now" and if Drezner thinks it is, he's delusional.
I don't think it's happening now, as any plain-text reading of the post makes clear. What is remarkable is that even with arcane, byzantine pathways for some migrants, the benefits have been extraordinary and the costs have been few.
"Arcane, byzantine pathways with extraordinary benefits and few costs" is one way of putting it. This might in fact apply to my wife who emigrated to Massachusetts from Thailand more than forty years ago and with a little help from me began, as an entrepreneur, a successful Thai Restaurant. Is she the exception or the rule? However, if the current benefits are indeed extraordinarily beneficial, with the emphasis on the word current and the burdens and responsibilities minimal and in another aside, an honest journalist, political scientist, statistician, sociologist or academic would have to admit that the effects, of the arrival and resettling, of possibly eight million "newcomers," are incalculable unknowable. and almost imponderable. What is known is that at the present time, in an inflationary, stressful environment, there is a backlash and uproar over the political dissembling and controversies associated with the influx. Are the current debates over what seem to be open border policies, expressed in citizens' forums about increasing costs to communities associated with medical care, housing, sustenance, education and policing of undocumented arrivals inconsequential? If you think that they are, that is the benefits will be great and the costs minimal, then you're forecasting a future that may not in fact resemble the past and by not considering the possible downside and stressing only the benefits, possibly intellectually dishonest and myopic. As a commentator recently opined, "I have nothing against immigrants, I'd just like someone in a position of authority to make an attempt to tell me who they are." Few costs, really?
Immigrants are progress. Once again, the price of progress falls heavily on the working class, who now must share housing, schools, jobs. The immigrant isn't moving into affluent neighborhoods.
But they could be. We keep turning down visas to very wealthy people. They are going to Canada and Australia because we refuse them entry. It is madness. There are literally armies of brilliant people who want to live here, and we tell them no, but let anyone in on the border. As someone kind of in the middle of this, I am so frustrated. This is a fixable problem, but we never fix it.
My guess is there are ten thousand poor immigrants to every"very wealthy" person trying to get in. Who gives a rip about "very wealthy people" anyway? What do they contribute? The "very wealthy" don't even work.
All the immigrants I know work, even those with millions. They also open up companies and hire people. The "leisure class" is very strange. The people coming in on investment visas are required to invest in a business. Many choose to set up new businesses. Where I live, there are more Chinese businesses than I can keep track of, and many if not most have been started with capital from back home. These people are not putting their money in mutual funds. They are creating new businesses and hiring people. Furthermore, they are following the rules.
Now, most of the people who have applied to come in to the US are not wealthy, but they are favorably self-selected, but more importantly, they are following rules. Most Americans do not appear to realize how much our society has changed in terms of rule following. It is important that we all follow rules because then there is an impetus to change stupid rules. We lack that impetus because empowered people do not need to follow rules. They simply do not care, and this is an existential threat to American civilization. This is how societies collapse.
The US could easily have two million immigrants per year legally. There exists NO REASON to allow people to randomly cross the Southern border. NONE. We are promoting the worst behavior, and we are severely damaging the image and the character of the country.
We should have high immigration. We can easily accommodate this. There exists NO REASON to admit anyone trying to cross at a border without a visa. I am convinced that Trump has members of Biden's cabinet bribed, or the Chinese do. We could solve our immigration problems overnight through simple legislation. Trump would lose his backing with this as well.
FYI, I am not inventing this idea. It is pretty much the default belief in the business world outside of the firms whose advantage is exploitative wages. The Walmarts of the country want cheap labor and nothing else.
Great examples of what I am saying are easy to find. Many firms have visas for foreign staff refused all the time. I know multiple people in Africa and East Asia, all of them have at least bachelors degrees, and they get refused repeatedly. A really great "compromise" between Republicans and Democrats might be to quadruple the visa lottery (it is now 50,000) while closing border crossings. A better agreement would have anyone detained place in holding facilities in Puerto Rico, and if they do not want it, then build processing facilities in Haiti. Haitians need the work, and it will discourage new crossings. Australia has successfully engaged in a high immigration, zero tolerance policy successfully. The only problem they have had is with housing (rapid population increases drive housing prices up). The US could pre-emptively fight housing affordability issues with Federal directives over-writing local zoning laws.
Well yes I don't dispute any of this. My point is mass immigration by the poor into working neighborhoods is a huge problem. As for wealthy people? Who cares?
Can you explain how increasing the labor supply would not reduce wages? I am having trouble getting my head around that. I have an economics degree. I have been a quant analyst for twenty years. I cannot understand how the mechanics of that work.
FYI, I am in favor of mass immigration to the US, but only legal mass immigration. No one should be allowed in at a border crossing, ever (unless they have a passport from a country with visa agreements). The US can and should have a lot of immigration, but not unregulated mass migration of random people. Your repeated assertions that increasing the labor supply will have no impact on the price of labor does not make sense to me. I am fine with importing doctors, journalists, teachers, nurses and engineers, just not random military-aged men who show up on the border. Furthermore, I am more comfortable with competition for university-educated Americans as opposed to basic laborers. We need high wages to get people back into employment, and only scarcity will raise wages. Furthermore, increasing the talent pool for the country will have knock-on effects driving innovation. This will never occur with illiterate Venezuelan Chavanistas. I have had the displeasure of meeting some in Chicago, and they are not the people we want here. It is repugnant that so many people from East Asia and Africa are told they must wait, but these psychopaths are let in. Fairness matters.
You are not supposed to talk about falling populations. That negates the climate change hysteria. No one gets grants describing how the problem will solve itself. Furthermore, no one becomes a millionaire green energy entrepreneur through the purchase of cheap Chinese solar panels. You need to get the government to give you money to make lower quality panels at a higher price in a needlessly expensive geography like California. The US is creating a whole new class of ultra rich from green subsidies, and they are literally pure corruption. The easy play, buy $1m in solar panels producing X kw power. Instead they spend $100m to get X/2 kw of power, and often they even put these small business constraints that further inflate costs.
Corruption is legal today. Go to the purchasing departments at any big city government and you will see open corruption, often codified into law. It is horrifying. No one is writing about it. Some has tried, but it is dangerous. Corruption today is worse than it was under the mafia decades ago, and no one risks jail time. If any journalists see this and want to talk, I have evidence to back up my claims. I would love to share it.
I am a 69 y.o. woman, retired from my landscape business, but still serving a few clients and doing habitat design. Yesterday, I was working with another good local contractor (hard to find these days, as grass cutters are not landscapers) to whom I want to turn over to care for a beloved client and I worked with his three Hispanic workers who I was training to recognize and be aware of the various emerging plantings. These three guys not only absorbed what I demonstrated to them, but worked circles around me, and were polite, thorough, and an absolute delight to work with. Over the years, I have met and worked with people from Mexico, Peru, and various parts of South and Central America. These folks have been human benchmarks in my life, demonstrating kindness, love of family, a work ethic not seen much in the US these days, and their good cheer, amidst all the humiliating treatment doled out to them by supposedly Christian Americans.
Immigrants feed America. Almost everything we eat is planted, picked, or processed by immigrants.
Americans have forgotten where they came from, and are fools for treating these primarily good folks like criminals.
The idea is to let in legal immigrants who have full status and are not taken advantage of. For decades undocumented workers were exploited by unethical employers (I saw it all the time). We should allow a diverse set of people into the US from all over the world. That works. What we cannot do is allow random people to enter the country without background checks (what we are doing now). It is especially grating when programs exist, but employers complain because they do not want to pay market wages or provide benefits. They prefer to bank the fruits of migrant labor and let the externalities fall on local communities.
We can and should have a lot of immigration, but it must be legal. There are so many people who want to come here. It is the height of stupidity to take in random people at the border while refusing entry to so many around the world. My wife's brother wants to come here and he has been denied twice (after enormous fees!). It sickens me that thugs can just cross at the border. We are bringing in exactly the wrong sort (Venezuelan toughs, Central American gangsters,...). There is an easy alternative (start approving more visas!). I personally know a dozen people in Africa who want to move here, all of them university educated. Why must they wait while anyone can walk across the border?
Claire's most important point: "Create simple, legal pathways..." That's what conservatives don't seem to understand. We can't just declare something legal or illegal. First, a correct way to do things must be established and all the apparatuses for doing things correctly must be put into place.
The correct way has existed for decades. That is what is meant by legal and illegal.
Claire,
From the Boston Globe, March 19th, reporting on the public reactions at town meetings to the dramatic influx in “newcomers” crossing the southern border:
“(The) state’s emergency shelter system ….is expected to spend about $1 billion this fiscal year to shelter roughly 7,500 families.”
Do the math. If I got the zeros right, that’s $133,000 per family. How does that work?
It could be the Globe’s facts are wrong, or it could be the state’s shelter system is extremely inefficient. But assuming the Globe’s numbers are correct how do you think spending $133,000 per migrant family goes down in a very blue state where the median family income is just shy of $90,000 and the average is ~ $65,000?
It may not be MAGA republicans who are raising the temperature in town meetings.
Exactly.
Reality only matters to those of us who live in it or when it catches up with those who don't.
Over 40 years ago, I spent 2 years giving visas to people in Ireland heading for the US. A part of the routine on a fairly regular schedule was processing a batch of special visas for newly graduated nurses from schools in Ireland who were heading for jobs in the US (rather than perhaps working for the National Health System in the UK or working in Ireland?). Their appearance at my office reflected the academic calendar and each batch were heading collectively to a specific US area though always different from the area previously named. My mother and several school friends were working as nurses and I personally knew that they were needed, though the final say was never mine but the Department of Labor in the US. Ironically, musicians were supposed to use the same visas and application system but routinely traveled and then performed on regular tourist visas - and apparently no one objected except just possibly an extremely alert immigration officer at the port of entry.
The possible malevolent view of "All the economic growth is coming from immigrants" is "Lower-skilled native-born Americans are not getting these jobs for one reason or another including location and ability to demand higher quality jobs"
Given the extremely low rate of unemployment and the fact that low-wage earners are reaping a disproportionate share of income gains over the past four years (https://x.com/JustinWolfers/status/1771006832091545947?s=20), that dog won't hunt.
* Am absolutely being devil's advocate here but civilian labor force participation rate has still not come back from the pandemic something something *
Yes. Trump locking the border helped the poorest Americans. I hate that orange fluff bag, but his stupid policy actually helped poor Americans, many of whom are immigrants. Most people pushing for mass migration employ people at rock bottom wages. They will do anything to maintain their $8 per hour workforce, but that only helps dirtbags who enjoy sticking it to their workers. I personally would love to offer visas to everyone who has a PhD in economics, engineering and / or hard science. There is no reason to not let all of them stay. I would do the same with US university graduates. That would be a great pool of labor and it would provide a controlled path. Instead we keep denying visas to so many people, then we open the border without background checks. It is madness. The only people who win from this are right wing demagogues and minimum wage-paying corporations.
"Create simple, legal pathways for people without criminal records to work." the devil is always in the details and in this case the methodologies and applications of the state's role in helping to provide for the common good. It "ain't happening right now" and if Drezner thinks it is, he's delusional.
I don't think it's happening now, as any plain-text reading of the post makes clear. What is remarkable is that even with arcane, byzantine pathways for some migrants, the benefits have been extraordinary and the costs have been few.
"Arcane, byzantine pathways with extraordinary benefits and few costs" is one way of putting it. This might in fact apply to my wife who emigrated to Massachusetts from Thailand more than forty years ago and with a little help from me began, as an entrepreneur, a successful Thai Restaurant. Is she the exception or the rule? However, if the current benefits are indeed extraordinarily beneficial, with the emphasis on the word current and the burdens and responsibilities minimal and in another aside, an honest journalist, political scientist, statistician, sociologist or academic would have to admit that the effects, of the arrival and resettling, of possibly eight million "newcomers," are incalculable unknowable. and almost imponderable. What is known is that at the present time, in an inflationary, stressful environment, there is a backlash and uproar over the political dissembling and controversies associated with the influx. Are the current debates over what seem to be open border policies, expressed in citizens' forums about increasing costs to communities associated with medical care, housing, sustenance, education and policing of undocumented arrivals inconsequential? If you think that they are, that is the benefits will be great and the costs minimal, then you're forecasting a future that may not in fact resemble the past and by not considering the possible downside and stressing only the benefits, possibly intellectually dishonest and myopic. As a commentator recently opined, "I have nothing against immigrants, I'd just like someone in a position of authority to make an attempt to tell me who they are." Few costs, really?
Immigrants are progress. Once again, the price of progress falls heavily on the working class, who now must share housing, schools, jobs. The immigrant isn't moving into affluent neighborhoods.
But they could be. We keep turning down visas to very wealthy people. They are going to Canada and Australia because we refuse them entry. It is madness. There are literally armies of brilliant people who want to live here, and we tell them no, but let anyone in on the border. As someone kind of in the middle of this, I am so frustrated. This is a fixable problem, but we never fix it.
My guess is there are ten thousand poor immigrants to every"very wealthy" person trying to get in. Who gives a rip about "very wealthy people" anyway? What do they contribute? The "very wealthy" don't even work.
All the immigrants I know work, even those with millions. They also open up companies and hire people. The "leisure class" is very strange. The people coming in on investment visas are required to invest in a business. Many choose to set up new businesses. Where I live, there are more Chinese businesses than I can keep track of, and many if not most have been started with capital from back home. These people are not putting their money in mutual funds. They are creating new businesses and hiring people. Furthermore, they are following the rules.
Now, most of the people who have applied to come in to the US are not wealthy, but they are favorably self-selected, but more importantly, they are following rules. Most Americans do not appear to realize how much our society has changed in terms of rule following. It is important that we all follow rules because then there is an impetus to change stupid rules. We lack that impetus because empowered people do not need to follow rules. They simply do not care, and this is an existential threat to American civilization. This is how societies collapse.
The US could easily have two million immigrants per year legally. There exists NO REASON to allow people to randomly cross the Southern border. NONE. We are promoting the worst behavior, and we are severely damaging the image and the character of the country.
We should have high immigration. We can easily accommodate this. There exists NO REASON to admit anyone trying to cross at a border without a visa. I am convinced that Trump has members of Biden's cabinet bribed, or the Chinese do. We could solve our immigration problems overnight through simple legislation. Trump would lose his backing with this as well.
FYI, I am not inventing this idea. It is pretty much the default belief in the business world outside of the firms whose advantage is exploitative wages. The Walmarts of the country want cheap labor and nothing else.
Great examples of what I am saying are easy to find. Many firms have visas for foreign staff refused all the time. I know multiple people in Africa and East Asia, all of them have at least bachelors degrees, and they get refused repeatedly. A really great "compromise" between Republicans and Democrats might be to quadruple the visa lottery (it is now 50,000) while closing border crossings. A better agreement would have anyone detained place in holding facilities in Puerto Rico, and if they do not want it, then build processing facilities in Haiti. Haitians need the work, and it will discourage new crossings. Australia has successfully engaged in a high immigration, zero tolerance policy successfully. The only problem they have had is with housing (rapid population increases drive housing prices up). The US could pre-emptively fight housing affordability issues with Federal directives over-writing local zoning laws.
Well yes I don't dispute any of this. My point is mass immigration by the poor into working neighborhoods is a huge problem. As for wealthy people? Who cares?
In many situations immigrants fill jobs not wanted by others
Can you explain how increasing the labor supply would not reduce wages? I am having trouble getting my head around that. I have an economics degree. I have been a quant analyst for twenty years. I cannot understand how the mechanics of that work.
FYI, I am in favor of mass immigration to the US, but only legal mass immigration. No one should be allowed in at a border crossing, ever (unless they have a passport from a country with visa agreements). The US can and should have a lot of immigration, but not unregulated mass migration of random people. Your repeated assertions that increasing the labor supply will have no impact on the price of labor does not make sense to me. I am fine with importing doctors, journalists, teachers, nurses and engineers, just not random military-aged men who show up on the border. Furthermore, I am more comfortable with competition for university-educated Americans as opposed to basic laborers. We need high wages to get people back into employment, and only scarcity will raise wages. Furthermore, increasing the talent pool for the country will have knock-on effects driving innovation. This will never occur with illiterate Venezuelan Chavanistas. I have had the displeasure of meeting some in Chicago, and they are not the people we want here. It is repugnant that so many people from East Asia and Africa are told they must wait, but these psychopaths are let in. Fairness matters.
You are not supposed to talk about falling populations. That negates the climate change hysteria. No one gets grants describing how the problem will solve itself. Furthermore, no one becomes a millionaire green energy entrepreneur through the purchase of cheap Chinese solar panels. You need to get the government to give you money to make lower quality panels at a higher price in a needlessly expensive geography like California. The US is creating a whole new class of ultra rich from green subsidies, and they are literally pure corruption. The easy play, buy $1m in solar panels producing X kw power. Instead they spend $100m to get X/2 kw of power, and often they even put these small business constraints that further inflate costs.
Corruption is legal today. Go to the purchasing departments at any big city government and you will see open corruption, often codified into law. It is horrifying. No one is writing about it. Some has tried, but it is dangerous. Corruption today is worse than it was under the mafia decades ago, and no one risks jail time. If any journalists see this and want to talk, I have evidence to back up my claims. I would love to share it.