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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don’t agree with the way MAGAs are approaching this as hunting down immigrants for sport, but there needs to be humane immigration reform. Plenty of people all over the world are in bad situations and would love to live in the US. Laws need to be respected. [/quote]

Drop me a lime with those laws or changed so that people like our guy have a realistic chance of legal immigration. Until then I’m hiding him.[/quote]

That’s the crux:  [b]he’ll never have a realistic chance at legal immigration because his economic value and utility is *derived* from his undocumented status.[/b]

Your worker is a good person and you are well intentioned. Nonetheless, if your worker had legal status his costs of operating his business would go up. As it is, he is paid cash under the table, he accepts more risk than a worker with legal status would (risks that would more properly be allocated to you the homeowner), and he very likely does not report his income to the IRS.  This all means he is cheaper than properly authorized labor. A cost savings that *you* are the true beneficiary of.   The net effect is that you get cheaper cost services and domestic workers with legal status are priced out of the market.

I’m sure you think that using and harboring cheap labor is noble. But the reality is that no matter how good your intentions are and how decent a person your landscaper is, you are intentionally engaging in economic activity that benefits you materially, helps the undocumented laborer but undercuts the domestic workforce.   You are selling out the American labor force so that you can have extra dollars.  In doing so, you are perpetuating inequality and creating a permanent economic underclass.

If your laborer ever actually had legal status, he would find himself price undercut by undocumented labor.   If you were using above board labor, your prices would go up. [/quote]

No, he'll never have a legal chance at immigration because the current law doesn't allow it under any circumstances.  And I'm not benefiting economically in any way, shape or form.  As I said earlier, I also have a lawn service where the workers appear to be documented and I'm very sure -- based on what I pay the company -- that the workers are paid less than my undocumented guy.  For your argument to make any sense, I would have to be paying my guy a low wage, but I'm not.  And do you know why I'm not?  Because he does a BETTER job than anyone I've used around here from your so-called "domestic" workforce.  They don't do half as good a job that he does.  I pay him what he's worth, and I'm not undercutting anyone.  If the "domestic" workforce wants $30+ an hour to take care of my yard, it can do that by doing comparable work.

In short, the whole premise of your argument is that I'm underpaying, which I'm not.  I'm paying generously.  I always pay generously for good work.  "Domestic" laborers, by and large, do shitty work and then blame immigrants. [/quote]

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”  The price point the domestic labor business charges in a market place where it is competing with undocumented labor is distorted and cannot be relied as a data point for setting the market labor wage.

It is not that you are paying generously, it is that your laborer is pricing generously.  And you are happy to take advantage of it.  Prices paid are pretax to labor but labor makes economic decision on an after-tax basis.

Dollars:  Assume your guy is working 50 hours a week and 52 weeks a year.  $30 * 50 * 52 = $78,000 per year.  As an undocumented immigrant, the odds are overwhelmingly high that he is:

*not properly business bonded and insured (that's 2-5% in costs)

*he is not paying into SS and MC (that's another 15.3%)

*he is not paying income taxes (that's another 10-15% depending on jurisdiction)

*he does not have commercial (or consumer) auto insurance (around 12.5% of his revenue if you figure about $10,000/year--which is low for commercial auto)

There are a bunch of other things like business licenses and compliance costs he is probably also skirting and you are already approaching an increase in 50% of his costs just to get him to the same place on an after tax basis.  He would need to charge you at least $45/hour if he was doing everything above board just to get himself to the same economic outcome.  You think you are generous because you are paying him $30/hour because it is in your economic interest to save the true cost differential of getting him to the same place economically.  Your greed is blinding you.  And the moment he charged $45/hour, he would lose so much business to the undocumented guy charging $30/hour that it makes no economic sense for your guy to ever get legal status.

Of course the competitor cannot pay his laborers $30 an hour.  He is likely paying full freight on the costs of running his business and the undocumented laborer is undercutting him.  Your legal workforce guy would need to charge closer to $60/hour to get his crew near $30/hour and even that is cutting it thin.  Most service business need to charge more around 2.5x what they pay their hourly laborers to get to a modest profit margin after accounting for all costs, so you would be talking in the ballpark of $75/hour price to get a domestic laborer to $30/hour (which will still be less on an after-tax basis than your undocumented laborer).

Risks:  Last week I helped connect three undocumented laborers with a good friend from law school.  They had been badly burned on a job where a homeowner asked them to unsafely burn debris on his ranch.  My friend has taken on several of these types of cases and achieved great outcomes against the home owner's insurance.  My undocumented laborers are so scared of any contact with the legal system (as was the case pre-Trump) that they are going to eat the injuries themselves.  And while you may be one of those nice white people that thinks so highly of yourself, I am a native citizen of and raised in the same country as these injured men came from.  As you would expect, I speak the language fluently, and I am trusted a lot to help a lot of these people never at a gain to myself.   It didn't matter how I explained the issue to them. They are going to eat the injuries.

Undocumented migration by and large is an economic issue, not a social justice issue (in this country, at least).  It always has been and always will be.  There is a reason why Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers were hostile to undocumented labor.  Chavez knew that this was purely an economic issue and rich farmers and wealthy people like you would use undocumented labor to undercut the wage and bargaining power of the domestic labor force.  I know you think you are doing something noble.  In reality, you are only perpetuating inequality and a permanent underclass.[/quote]

👏👏👏👏

Excellent post. [/quote]

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