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Legal Immigration
FTFY.
They don’t get paid? They’re press-ganged into service by people with guns? Care to show your work on this?
Take a device capable of recording video. Go to a mirror. Repeat the facial expressions you had when you read my comment. Post it. Then, my work here will be done.
They are severely underpaid when illegal. And making them legal doesn’t make them more wanted, it sends off those looking for cheap labor for another source of cheap labor. It is very much a surrogate for slave labor, only it is cheaper for the business than it would be to feed, clothe, and house them. Giving the migrants legal status costs them those jobs because now they have to be hired at minimum wage – which is why Americans don’t do those jobs… they legally can’t even if they wanted to. So many here have said they worked jobs like that in their youth – likely when minimum wage and labor laws were minuscule compared to today.
That may not apply to you, but I do suspect you feel entitled to employees at the wages you wish to pay without competing for the labor.
If we aren’t entitled to jobs without competition, you should not be entitled to labor without competition.
This is one of those places where if you really want to free migrants to come in and get jobs, first fight to eliminate minimum wage and other labor laws that creates a preference for illegal immigration.
This is correct.
What does this mean? They contract at the market clearing wage for the work performed. The real problem is that Americans are prevented from contracting at those market clearing rates due of minimum wage laws.
Of course not, I employ people in perhaps the most competitive labor market in America. I feel entitled to the quality of employee I an afford at a given price in a free market for labor. Unfortunately, we do not have a free market for labor: such a market would be devoid of price controls such as minimum wage laws, subsidies like welfare and imposed costs like Obamacare. It would also include the free movement of labor across borders (this does not mean such laborers would be entitled to vote, citizenship or government largesse).
I completely agree. Let’s open up the labor market to competition. This will drive down costs for employers and drive down prices for consumers.
i.e. slave labor
A free market for labor is slave labor?
We really do need to eliminate the minimum wage. Hard to think of a bigger single distorter of the economy.
I know, it’s strange isn’t it? I thought we were on a right leaning website.
Technically it’s not slave labor. During Reconstruction much of the South tried to re-institute as much of the slave labor system as possible except that they were then required to do it as contract labor, with the terms of the contracts amounting to much the same as slave labor. But technically it was not.