Reply to immmigrant haters: do you really want to be like Japan?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Oh you can stuff it.  Please, detail here all the progressive, labor-rights policies you advocate for?

Regularlizing immigration is PRECISELY to protect workers right.  Having an "illegal" class of workers is a recipe for exploitation.  [/quote]

Stuff it? I thought you're all about intelligent debate and research and whatnot?

You have this weird, utopic idea that illegal migrants who put up with low pay, terrible conditions, and utter absence of employee rights for no reason other than not being able to work better jobs, will continue working in the same terrible jobs once they are legally able to work anywhere else.  Why? You think they are loyal to their slumlords?

The industries that rely on illegal migrant labor aren't doing it because they love migrants. They do it because they love paying artificially low wages and ignoring benefits and employee rights.  That's what you are arguing should be preserved.  And you are somehow persisting in your conviction that people who currently eat margarine because they can't have butter will weirdly continue doing that even when butter becomes available. [/quote]

You're the one distorting the argument.  Legalizing labor is the first way to protect worker's rights.  That's obvious.  And no, I don't think immigrants should be a permanent underclass - the reverse, actually.  I never said that I think immigrants should never move up, and that's not what the economically-based argument on immigration is about, at all.  It is about filling current labor market needs, not about repressing social/economic mobility.  And of course, immigrating to the US generally is a huge leap in mobility for many immigrants. To say that we need immigration for low-skilled employment does not mean that we should repress workers. [/quote]

The answer to "current labor market needs" is temporary, time-bound guest worker visas.  Like haitch one bees but for the illiterate.  Not permanent residency.  Because the only way to make sure migrants stay in the low-wage, low-benefit industries that currently depend on them, as you say, is to make them legally unable to work anywhere else. [/quote]

That doesn't help with our demographic issues.  I'm not sure you're getting it -- native-born Americans are not reproducing at the rate needed to support the country as Boomers die off.  Also, I thought y'all ranted about "assimiliating"?  A class of temporary workers is not going to assimilate.

"The easiest way to grasp the seriousness of what is happening is to look at the fertility rate, which is the average number of babies born to mothers between the ages of fifteen and forty-four. Merely to replace the existing population, the fertility rate needs to be about 2.1 per cent. During the baby-boomer years, it reached 3.7 per cent. In 2017, it was just 1.76 per cent. If this trend persists, as it seems likely to do, it portends a declining population and a sharply rising dependency ratio.

From a public-finance perspective, there are several possible ways to tackle the looming challenge. One is to reduce the level of retirement benefits significantly—but that would be very unpopular and difficult to achieve politically. A second option is to increase the proportion of people who are working, among both working-age people and senior citizens. That, too, would be a mighty challenge, because the trend is going in the opposite direction. Since the start of 2000, the employment-to-population ratio among adults sixteen or older has fallen, from 64.6 per cent to 60.4 per cent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. To be sure, the Great Recession and its aftermath were partly responsible for this decline. But so was the aging population: employment rates tend to decline in older-age cohorts.

The final option is to welcome more immigrants, particularly younger immigrants, so that, in the coming decades, they and their descendants will find work and contribute to the tax base. Almost all economists agree that immigration raises G.D.P. and stimulates business development by increasing the supply of workers and entrepreneurs. There is some disagreement about the net fiscal impact of first-generation migrants. The argument is that they tend to be less educated and therefore earn lower wages than the native population, and that they tend to contribute less in taxes. But this is disputed. There is no doubt about the contribution that immigrant families make over the longer term, however."

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-the-united-states-needs-more-immigrants[/quote]

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