Immigrants actually raise wages in California.?
What do you think?
Answer:
Don't believe everything you read. The aricle sounds pro-immigrant (illegal) to me.
I think it's a fact that racist antis don't want to face.
illegal or legal immigrants?
They are only talking about legal immigrants. They are documented in the books or there would be no way to create a report based on analysis of wage and employment data. No illegals included here. Until they find a way to gather the magnitude the data is incomplete and unreliable.
I love your heart............didn't you say you worked in law (wish you lived around here).......anyway here is my spin on this question.
You are going to get killed here. Nobody has ever questioned the fact that immigrants are are an asset to the US........what ISN'T mentioned *plainly enough for most the idiots who post here* in this piece is the illegal aspect. The piece was GREAT and what "I" have always known.........keep up the good work
Illegal immigrants do not raise wages and sent more than 6 billion dollars a year back home therefore taking that money OUT of the US economy. Mercurynews? Cummon.
I think that the disadvantages far outweigh the advantages. What is the benefit of earning more money, when you have to pay more money out for things like taxes, medical expenses, and housing because of the ones that don't pay in but still are using?
Be legal or be gone.
Politics at its best.
I know a gentleman that works at Tyson Chicken and he had to go through a temp agency to get hired at $10. I can remember 10 years ago americans were making $15-$19 an hour at the same plant.
If illegal workers raised the wages then why are so many businesses hiring them. That article doesn't reflect the majority of what is happening in our country.
Now they are most likely going to get the "Dream Act" in state tuition for illegal aliens. Sad country we live in, and these are the politicians we put into office. Soon all countries will begin sending their poor to the U.S.
Over $20 Billion was sent back last year. Which didn't benefit our economy. Maybe the money wiring companies.
I seriously doubt that this is true-it sure sounds like it is pro-illegal to me.I know here in Ohio they have lowered the wages.
This only applied to a very small minority of specially trained, bilingual government employees who work with immigrants. Again, we are tired of being told we have to adapt to immigrants rather than them adapting to us. And, most people are not specially trained, college educated or bilingual. Legal immigration in the past was a trickling in of foreigners who had a hard time integrating, but were required to do so. It was like a badge of honor for them to accomplish this and become Americans. Now we have a FLOOD of immigrants, half of whom are illegal, making up about 60% of the population (in California, which is where this article is from). They dominate the unskilled labor market and social services. The people they are squeezing out are the poor and working class.
They have never been a major threat to people with money, education or special training. Unless, of course, you count the fact that the swell at the bottom and the division between the haves and have nots lowers the quality of life of the middle class. But that's not what we're talking about.
This article/study is misleading. Just because things are fine for a handful of people, they seem to want to take focus off the majority for whom things weren't fine before the run for the border and aren't fine now with all the unfair competition.
Job growth over the last five years is the weakest on record. The US economy came up more than 7 million jobs short of keeping up with population growth. That's one good reason for controlling immigration. An economy that cannot keep up with population growth should not be boosting population with heavy rates of legal and illegal immigration.
Over the past five years the US economy experienced a net job loss in goods producing activities. The entire job growth was in service- providing activities--primarily credit intermediation, health care and social assistance, waiters, waitresses and bartenders, and state and local government.
US manufacturing lost 2.9 million jobs, almost 17% of the manufacturing work force. The wipeout is across the board. Not a single manufacturing payroll classification created a single new job.
The declines in some manufacturing sectors have more in common with a country undergoing saturation bombing during war than with a super- economy that is "the envy of the world."
* Communications equipment lost 43% of its workforce. Semiconductors and electronic components lost 37% of its workforce.
* The workforce in computers and electronic products declined 30%.
* Electrical equipment and appliances lost 25% of its employees.
* The workforce in motor vehicles and parts declined 12%.
* Furniture and related products lost 17% of its jobs.
* Apparel manufacturers lost almost half of the work force.
* Employment in textile mills declined 43%.
* Paper and paper products lost one-fifth of its jobs.
* The work force in plastics and rubber products declined by 15%.
* Even manufacturers of beverages and tobacco products experienced a 7% shrinkage in jobs.
* The knowledge jobs that were supposed to take the place of lost manufacturing jobs in the globalized "new economy" never appeared.
* The information sector lost 17% of its jobs, with the telecommunications work force declining by 25%.
* Even wholesale and retail trade lost jobs.
* Despite massive new accounting burdens imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley, accounting and bookkeeping employment shrank by 4%.
* Computer systems design and related lost 9% of its jobs.
* Today, there are 209,000 fewer managerial and supervisory jobs than 5 years ago.
In five years, the US economy only created 70,000 jobs in architecture and engineering, many of which are clerical. Little wonder engineering enrollments are shrinking. There are no jobs for graduates. The talk about engineering shortages is absolute ignorance. There are several hundred thousand American engineers who are unemployed and have been for years. No student wants a degree that is nothing but a ticket to a soup line. Many engineers have written to me that they cannot even get Wal-Mart jobs because their education makes them over-qualified.
Offshore outsourcing and offshore production have left the US awash with unemployment among the highly educated. The low measured rate of unemployment does not include discouraged workers.
Labor arbitrage has made the unemployment rate less and less a meaningful indicator. In the past unemployment resulted mainly from turnover in the labor force and recession. Recoveries pulled people back into jobs.
Unemployment benefits were intended to help people over the down time in the cycle when workers were laid off. Today the unemployment is permanent as entire occupations and industries are wiped out by labor arbitrage as corporations replace their American employees with foreign ones.
Economists who look beyond political press releases estimate the US unemployment rate to be between 7% and 8.5%. There are now hundreds of thousands of Americans who will never recover their investment in their university education.
Unless the BLS is falsifying the data or businesses are reporting the opposite of the facts, the US is experiencing a job depression. Most economists refuse to acknowledge the facts, because they endorsed globalization. It was a win-win situation, they said.
They were wrong.
No sane economist can possibly maintain that a deplorable record of merely 1,054,000 net new private sector jobs over five years is an indication of a healthy economy. The total number of private sector jobs created over the five year period is 500,000 jobs less than one year's legal and illegal immigration! (In a December 2005 Center for Immigration Studies report based on the Census Bureau's March 2005 Current Population Survey, Steven Camarota writes that there were 7,9 million new immigrants between January 2000 and March 2005.)
On February 10 the Commerce Department released a record US trade deficit in goods and services for 2005--$726 billion. The US deficit in Advanced Technology Products reached a new high.
Offshore production for home markets and jobs outsourcing has made the US highly dependent on foreign provided goods and services, while simultaneously reducing the export capability of the US economy. It is possible that there might be no exchange rate at which the US can balance its trade.
(By Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review.)
It just proves one thing.
Paper will hold still and you can write anything on it......Doesn't make it true but paper does not care nor does it differentiate between fact and fiction.
From the samre article:
``It's like a man bites dog story, isn't it?'' said Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA Educational and Research Foundation in Arlington, Va. The group conducts research on immigrant labor force, and supports strict limits to legal immigration.
``It paints a rosy picture,'' a doubtful Beck said. ``It seems surprising.''
Gordon Hanson, director of the Center on Pacific Economies at the University of San Diego, who has conducted studies on immigration and the U.S. labor force, said he disagrees with Peri's findings that ``immigrants are just hurting themselves.''
Hanson cites a 2003 study by Harvard University economist George Borjas that said low-skilled native workers have been hurt by immigration.
Outside of California, in regions with growing immigrant populations, researchers have documented the negative impact of the influx of immigrants on the native labor force, said Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., a national that advocates for limits to legal immigration.
It would appear from the above that more disagree than agree.
That whole report seems predicated on the poeple who were doing the jobs that the immigrants take away from them, then being 'able to get higher paying jobs'
well now that depends on if there are higher paying jobs available now doesn it.
Its ok you took away my landscaping job, now im free to go program web pages or be a lawyer or something... lol what an article.
It is a very narrow review of the effects. It does not concede that "push" factors may be involved nor does it allow for living expenses [outside the norm] to be invested into this report. For example one section states
"The values reported in Table 4 are the percentage changes in real wages resulting from immigration over the period 1990–2004, relative to a baseline scenario with no immigration
(and keeping other things constant). "
Keeping other things constant; is an impossibility, the only way to do that would to have a stagnant economy which does not happen. Median cost of homes, energy and other related items skyrocketed in the 90's.
Factors such as those should be analyzed as contributors to possible real wage growth instead of blithely assuming immigration as the "only" cause.
There certainly would be a way to differentiate. The guy who started Google immigrated -legally. Wonder how much that throws off the curve in California?
The fact is, as with every country, we slant our permitted immigration towards those with skills and education, because those immigrants bring a net economic benefit. We let in some poor, but since we subsidize their education and other services, we limit that more. Therefor unless you carve out illegal immigrant impacts alone, it is meaningless.
What is funny is that even if you average the impact of the farm hands to that of the guy who started google (and many other skilled immigrants) you still only get a 'slight' raise in wages for 'high school drop outs'. Isn't it coincidental that California just started a new $7.50 minimum wage? Because it was desparately needed, of course. I suspect that has more to do with any raise of wages for high school drop outs. On the other hand, I note that they didn't examine the wage impact on construction workers.
Sociald - very good point.
They raise the economy and keep the state wealthy
Actually the wages are high in California because it is so expensive to live. How do you explain the other 32 states where illegals are keeping the wages down because big companies do not want to pay an American a good wage when the can hire an illegal for next to nothing.
More people = More workers = More jobs done = Better living condition
However, increased wage doesn't necessary mean better living condition.
On the other hand, decreased wage especially the lack of a minimum wage law might mean better living condition.
Low wages mean more people are capable of being employers and be employed, the goods and services are priced lower since the wages are lower, and so on.
High wages mean less people are capable of being employers and be employed, the goods and services are priced higher since the wages are higher, and so on.
Immigrants and low wages might have been the only thing that stopped the American economy to go badly.
It should be noted that they are doing things logically, they go to places and work there, they work at wages that are considered high back at their home town, they sent the money home and spent it there.
Americans used to do that. Fathers, brothers, and so on usually were hired to construction works at far away places, only to send the money back home to their families.
Newspapers, magazines, TV shows, and Hollywood are owned by corporate monopolies. Which are lobbied by their fellow big businesses to be pro-illegal. Or should I say, pro-cheap labor.
Big businesses only see dollar signs.
Here's the way they think:
Why should I hire an American and pay him or her a good salary with benefits when I can get cheap labor, without paying him benefits and work his butt off for 50 hours a week?
Corporate fat cats live in gated communities, have armed body guards and can escape to safe places in their private jets if they have to. So they could care less if the streets in your neighborhood become more dangerous. All that matters is that these corporate fat cats get rich in the process.
The immigration information post by website user , MyTend.com not guarantee correctness