[Suntzu]

Yep, helping big business and hurting just about everyone else.

[Pants-of-dog]

Bring them down? Wages have stagnated and unions fell to pieces in direct correlation with changes to immigration laws and globalization.

Way to ignore the evidence that has been supplied to you.

You're messing with the labor supply out of a foolish and misguided sense of correct inequality, the only winner is the employer.

If that is what you call looking at studies and reading the conclusions.

What do you call it when someone ignores evidence, preaches a racist position, and couches it in Marxist rhetoric?

[anasawad]

The US is an economy based purely on immegration.
Its literally a slogan for the country.
The H1B or something like that visas for example is a main driver for the entire economy.

[Suntzu]

No its not. Just guessing but about 90% or more of the folks working in the U.S. are not immigrants.

[anasawad]

There are over 80 million immegrants in the US, 42 million of them are part of the workforce in the US, Which amounts to near 1 third of the workforce.
Don't remember the exact percentage but i did post it here before, around 50-60% if i recall of all the academic workforce and scientists in the US are foreigners.

Mind you but Engineers and scientists are the main corner stone of any economy, and in the US, half of them aren't Americans.
Not to mention that the US economy is gradually being owned by outsiders, currently up to 20% of the economy in the US is owned by foreigners.

And ofcourse that those you call "Americans", are mostly generations of immegrants, since a large portion of the American population since the late 19th century and the overall 20th century are immegrants from both Europe and Asia.

So....yea, based on immegration.

[Suntzu]

In 2010 about 12.9% foreign born.

[anasawad]

Thats a 2014 numbers. Saying that near 1 third of the US workforce are immegrants. And don't get it wrong, not immegrants as in immegrants who were nationalized. No immegrants as in they still don't have full citizenship.
There are far far more than that with citizenship from all over the world.

[Suntzu]

The 12.9% 40,000,000 number is foreign born so that includes citizen, non-citizen, legal and illegal. It also includes children and old folks who aren't in the work force.

[anasawad]

Not really, no, it doesn't include citizens, nor does includes children. Because the number is 42.2 million immegrants and up 81 million if we calculated their children whom are considered second generation immegrants. The children if born in the US do have citizenship, the rest mostly don't, there is a difference between a green card and a full citizenship.

And this number also does not calculate the 11 million illegal immegrants.

And this overall number does not count the 10s of millions whom were born in the US because their grandparents were immegrants or refugees in the 20th century. mainly from Europe and Asia.

[Suntzu]

Those are official census numbers and includes everyone that was foreign born, children, adults, citizen and non-citizen, legal and illegal. It does not include folks who were born in the U.S. Folks who were born here are not immigrants.

[anasawad]

Actually they're called second generation immegrants. So yes, they are.

That means 26% of the population is either an immegrant or a child of one.
If we want to take it back even further we can look at third generation immegrants as well, and we'll get an even higher percentage.
So really the US with so many immegrants, and over the past century being the host of 10s of millions of immegrants and refugees boosting its industrial and economic boom.
I think its fair to say that it is a country that is based on immegration. at the very least.

Even if you looked at historic records,you'd see that immegration levels kept increasing year after anther so far till now and on going.
And the country kept growing further and further with more immegrants to come.

Thats why its written on the statue of liberty, you know, the defining land mark of the US.

[Suntzu]

Well, if you do it that way we are all immigrants except for a few Red Indians.

[anasawad]

True. thats why i said the US is a country based on immigration. From its very start.
And currently,the US through the H1B is expanding its industries, scientific and educational facilities, etc. With a considerably large rate of immigrants.
So immigration does play a major role in the US economy.

[Suntzu]

Well, if you consider 12.9% major.

[The Sabbaticus]

Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers

The candidates tell drastically different stories about immigration. They’re both skipping half the truth.

By George J. Borjas

September/October 2016

’ve been studying immigration for 30 years, but 2016 was the first time my research was cited in a convention speech. When he accepted his party’s nomination in July, Donald Trump used one of my economic papers to back up his plan to crack down on immigrants and build a physical wall: “Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African-American and Latino workers,” he told the cheering crowd. But he was telling only half the story.

Hillary Clinton, for her part, seemed to be telling only the other half. At her convention a week later, Clinton claimed that immigrants, both legal and illegal, improve the economy for everyone. She told the crowd: “I believe that when we have millions of hardworking immigrants contributing to our economy, it would be self-defeating and inhumane to try to kick them out. Comprehensive immigration reform will grow our economy.”

Here’s the problem with the current immigration debate: Neither side is revealing the whole picture. Trump might cite my work, but he overlooks my findings that the influx of immigrants can potentially be a net good for the nation, increasing the total wealth of the population. Clinton ignores the hard truth that not everyone benefits when immigrants arrive. For many Americans, the influx of immigrants hurts their prospects significantly.

This second message might be hard for many Americans to process, but anyone who tells you that immigration doesn’t have any negative effects doesn’t understand how it really works. When the supply of workers goes up, the price that firms have to pay to hire workers goes down. Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent. Even after the economy has fully adjusted, those skill groups that received the most immigrants will still offer lower pay relative to those that received fewer immigrants.

Both low- and high-skilled natives are affected by the influx of immigrants. But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip. The monetary loss is sizable. The typical high school dropout earns about $25,000 annually. According to census data, immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent. As a result, the earnings of this particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year.

We don’t need to rely on complex statistical calculations to see the harm being done to some workers. Simply look at how employers have reacted. A decade ago, Crider Inc., a chicken processing plant in Georgia, was raided by immigration agents, and 75 percent of its workforce vanished over a single weekend. Shortly after, Crider placed an ad in the local newspaper announcing job openings at higher wages. Similarly, the flood of recent news reports on abuse of the H-1B visa program shows that firms will quickly dismiss their current tech workforce when they find cheaper immigrant workers.

But that’s only one side of the story. Somebody’s lower wage is always somebody else’s higher profit. In this case, immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer. And the additional profits are so large that the economic pie accruing to all natives actually grows. I estimate the current “immigration surplus”—the net increase in the total wealth of the native population—to be about$50 billion annually. But behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year. Immigrants, too, gain substantially; their total earnings far exceed what their income would have been had they not migrated.

When we look at the overall value of immigration, there’s one more complicating factor: Immigrants receive government assistance at higher rates than natives. The higher cost of all the services provided to immigrants and the lower taxes they pay (because they have lower earnings) inevitably implies that on a year-to-year basis immigration creates a fiscal hole of at least $50 billion—a burden that falls on the native population.

But that’s only one side of the story. Somebody’s lower wage is always somebody else’s higher profit. In this case, immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer. And the additional profits are so large that the economic pie accruing to all natives actually grows. I estimate the current “immigration surplus”—the net increase in the total wealth of the native population—to be about$50 billion annually. But behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year. Immigrants, too, gain substantially; their total earnings far exceed what their income would have been had they not migrated.

When we look at the overall value of immigration, there’s one more complicating factor: Immigrants receive government assistance at higher rates than natives. The higher cost of all the services provided to immigrants and the lower taxes they pay (because they have lower earnings) inevitably implies that on a year-to-year basis immigration creates a fiscal hole of at least $50 billion—a burden that falls on the native population.

But let’s not be naive. Policy fights over immigration have often been fierce, taking decades to get resolved. To even partially compensate those Americans who lose from the current policy would require massive new government programs to supervise a massive wealth redistribution totaling tens of billions of dollars. The employers that profit from the way things are won’t go along with these transfers without an epic political struggle. And many of the libertarians who obsessively advocate for open borders will surely balk at such a huge expansion of government. To make this work, Clinton and her supporters will have to acknowledge that our current immigration policy has indeed left some Americans behind. And Trump and his supporters will have to acknowledge that a well-designed immigration plan can be beneficial. All this is probably not going to happen. But only then can we have a real debate over immigration policy.

George J. Borjas is professor of economics and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of the forthcoming We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative.

Politico

[anasawad]

Is 26% of the population being immegrants or direct children of immegrants minor ? If we went to third generation immegrants we'll probably get atleast a 3rd to a half of population.

[Suntzu]

How 'bout if we go to 5th generation. Immigrants, persons born outside the U.S., only account for 12.9% of the U.S. population.

[SueDeNîmes]

As far as I can tell, you have not made any serious and rational objections to those findings.

Here is another one that says roughly the same thing:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w12497
http://www.nber.org/papers/w12497.pdf

And another:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14188
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14188.pdf

Dead links here, but if they say roughly the same thing I've roughly the same objections.

As far as I can tell, other studies with different results (which no one has cited as evidence) are from groups with an obvious anti-immigrant bias.

What, like the Bank of England? :

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politic ... ekers.html

The one meta-analysis I did look at was inconclusive.

That's because whether the wage reduction is found to be "significant" depends on the statistical techniques and assumptions (as I said). What's even less clear is the counterfactual: how much the ready supply of cheap foreign labour has to do with the fact that wages aren't actually increasing along with productivity for most folks. A lot, I'd say, but that immigration is a red herring since exporting the jobs has become cheaper and easier than importing the labour.

All this to say that the claim that immigrants bring down wages for the locals is not supported by the evidence.

Yeah it is, including your own cite. The consensus is that there's a small negative impact, with ongoing contention as to its significance.

--------------

All this to say that the actual reason for immigration (and immigration is not necessarily a bad thing) is the global system of inequality that we call capitalism.

On the contrary, your cites push a very positive view of global capitalism. Free movement of capital and labour underpin their models where immgration doesn't depress wages. They're basically extensions of the theoretical arguments many economists make against regulation in general. Whatever you believe about immigration, be careful whose ideology you fly.

[Suntzu]

Globalization is a great thing. Everyone will be the same! Guess what, we ain't all gonna be rich. What do you get when you average the wealth of an American and that of a Sub-Saharan African? That, my friend, is the end result of globalization.

[The Immortal Goon]

The riddle nobody has been able to solve, and this is historically true, is how a country or people or whatever is supposed to protect itself from competition from immigrants or whatever.

Here are the options:

1. Terrorize immigrants. This results in them working for cheaper in black markets and being the go-to source of labour for a lot of people. Hence things like this.

2. Organize nativists into organize into exclusive unions and whatnot to spur "legitimate" labour hiring. Until someone goes over your heads to take all the extremely cheap and desperate labour to do a grand project. Now your exclusive union is reduced to begging for shittier jobs in competition with the "other" that has been inadvertently made into something of a union.

3. Get really tough on immigration, get everyone on board, create an Exclusion Act. Industrial capitalists just move their production to China, Mexico, or wherever else. Now you can apply for a job in China!

These things never work because you're trying to accomplish this stuff in the framework of global capitalism. You have the bourgeoisie, who can cross and dictate border policy as they wish, and you—who cannot. Why you think you can win in this rigged game is beyond me.

It's the economy, stupid.