It is fairly well understood by anyone living in statistical reality that illegal immigration is fueled by economics. Since the United States does not enforce it's immigration laws, illegal labor could earn more money in the United States and employers loved the cheaper wages, no workman's comp, no unemployment benefits and no taxes.
So, now that the economy is falling apart illegal labor is going home.
Will this help the unemployment statistics and wage levels for U.S. legal unskilled labor? It's yet to be seen but at least the economic realities of what causes massive influxes of illegal workers is being made quite clear for the majority. Of course the multi-billion dollar underground drug economy is a whole other ball game.
It's about earning money any way one can and trying to earn the most money one can. It's about how regional economies when collapsed will cause dramatic, massive influxes in labor supply to other nations unless immigration laws are enforced and domestic economies craft policies to create strong regional middle classes, both for strong societies and for stabilization of labor markets.
Kind of.
Well, even though you begin with a logical fallacy so weak it feels like pleading, I still gave the post a read.
Fact is, there is not just one thing "fueling" immigration. Knowing they can get paid more "uptown" than "downtown" is one reason workers come. And a very big reason for much of it of course.
Another is that it's part of an understood deal. The US has been recruiting labor for generations from Mexico. Before we got very intense about the border, it was a regular thing. Migration back and forth over the border. It's only lately that more and more people stay here. Because it's too hard to go back and forth with all the stepped up border patrol etc. I mean....it's not as if they float up here when low on cash, either. You DO know that companies place ads in places they hope to hook into cheap illegal labor, right? It's not a secret. Even before the Bracero program it was a regular thing. And before that, Mexicans' land was being taken by US citizens and their rights stripped away until bloggers today imagine the border is a real thing that can obliterate truth and history and the patterns of nature.
Anyway, it's ridiculous to jot off some simplified post that ends up saying the way to stop people from seeking ways to quell their hardship and hunger is to be punitive or more forceful. If not ridiculous, than just not very intelligent.
Migration north and south will definitely not ceased as long as this global system is one in which one nation can live rich in part at the expense of those around her. Think of it as a larger scale version of osmosis, that natural event dictated by inequal forces that both exist on disparate sides of a membrane wall and that will, in time, equalize.
that's all true
but the issue that is refused to be recognized so often is how this erodes wage levels by increasing supply as well as subverting employment law, taxes etc. i.e. a Race to the Bottom for everyone. I'm also saying Guatemala (in this case for that's where this guy is from) needs a strong regional economy that is also supporting it's national workforce.
I'm going after this idea that is so discounted in international trade theory and by economists which is that while they acknowledge regional/local economies may suffer from globalization, they completely discount the time window of that suffering as well as it's cumulative effects.
My next statement is pure hypothesis, completely unproved by me or investigated...but I suspect strongly that those local economies, or "regional economic destruction" add up to national economic malaise and their discounting in international trade theory is a huge "bad math" error. Again, not proven, I have to look into this, just a intuitive theory on my part.
The rest, the wage repression, oversupply, forced migration....other economists have talked about just the corporate pundits will rarely address.
I do know this
You DO know that companies place ads in places they hope to hook into cheap illegal labor, right?
I do know this, and I regularly check Mexican web sites for such adverts before doing business with a company. If they're skimping on labor costs, who knows what else they'll skimp on- such companies are untrustworthy.
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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
Maria, there has always been
Maria, there has always been migratory flow around the border, but ordinary Americans have become "very intense about the border" because there has been huge in-migration into regions of the U.S. that have not traditionally been areas of migration from Mexico. This has caused not only the depression of wages and the destruction of livelihoods for low-earning Americans, but serious amounts of social and cultural disruption. Sorry, but "Mexicans' land" was not "being taken by US citizens and their rights stripped away" in places like Iowa or Illinois, or Virginia or Washington State. That is not to bash the Mexican migrants, who are responding to economic pressures brought into play by the elites of both nations, who have enacted self-serving policies that have disrupted the lives of ordinary citizens of both Mexico and America. And while it is undoubtedly true that the conquests and policies of "rich America" have negatively affected Mexico, the relative wealth and poverty of these two countries is due to many other factors beyond the behavior of those wicked Americans, it is not the result of "natural forces", and Mexico is not going to become wealthy merely by some process of osmotic equalization. (Actually, Mexico is a fairly wealthy country, with lots of really rich people. It's just that the wealth is very unequally distributed. If anything, under current policies the U.S. seems to be "osmotically equalizing" to the pronounced inequality of wealth characteristic of Mexico, rather than Mexicans being raised to the prosperous middle-class model that used to characterize the U.S.)