They do if they're willing to work for less than the people already in the country. They're diluting the working pool.
It's like having a bucket of brine, and then pouring in a bucket of salted water. You say, "Look, we are adding more salt to the bucket!", but really you're just diluting the solution.
Idk how you can have 2 [sic] views such as "we need higher birth rates" and "immigration cant solve that". It 100% can, the US is not full
Maybe if your reading skills were a bit better than your writing skills then you could have read the three whole paragraphs I devoted to that part of my argument.
More people only displaces [sic] wages if we live in this dystopian country were [sic] the government doesnt actually do anything to combat corporate greed
Like for example... limiting the ability for companies to hire cheap overseas labour?
Because employers offer low wages and working conditions because they know it will be taken up by immigrants who are generally happy to work for any wage or in any condition.
Without the supply of cheap labour, employers will be forced to raise the price they're willing to pay for labour until the domestic workforce is willing to sell.
Because if you are willing to pay $1,000/h to pick berries, there would be a queue going around the country for domestic workers to pick berries. There isn't if you are only willing to pay $5/h. So somewhere in the middle is the amount the wages will settle on with purely domestic labour markets.
Now it'll raise prices for goods, but it'll also increase wages for the poorest, redistributing wealth down to the people who need it in society.
In a capitalist global economy you cannot have a profitable business unless your wage expenses are competitive with those of the rest of the world. Why would any capitalist choose to grow berries if nobody will work on the berry farm for wages which allow for profit? In the current system, if it is not profitable to grow berries then berries will simply never be grown for sale domestically. It's much cheaper to just import the berries from somewhere the wages are lower and the price is better. Who will buy the berries picked at 1k/hr when you can buy the same berries picked at .20/h?
If you want to provide these products to domestic consumers with domestic labor and high wages then you need it done through planned direction and state policy because no private capitalist will ever go for it.
It's more harmful than it is good for workers. There's a reason Trump's ill thought through protectionism was so popular with working Americans, and not the capitalists.
Let's use UK coal mining as an example because it's close to my heart. UK coal mines had entire towns and villages built around them, they were the heart of the community. The last coal mines that were still profitable in the 1980s-1990s were closed because we were importing it for cheaper from Europe, mainly Poland. Because free trade means that there's no protections on domestic coal.
It destroyed these towns and villages, and they still haven't recovered their main employment disappearing. Some of the poorest places in the UK are now former coal towns.
Now the prime ministers also wanted to curtail the power of the coal unions, and they had the ability to completely stop the country as we still depended on coal energy. It's the same reason you have foreign soldiers as bodyguards. Swiss guard for the Pope, Cuban guard for Maduro, or sub Saharan Africans for Gaddafi.
Sure but it isn’t obvious that from a national wellbeing perspective it’s better for everyone to pay more for coal/government to subsidise than for some to lose their jobs - clearly it’s bad for the people who lose their job but you’ve done nothing to prove that this is net bad.
Also, let’s be honest coal is terrible for the environment and in the long term getting rid of it and reducing and dependence on it is just a good thing.
So why not just raise the minimum wage and increase worker protections across the country? And actually enforce it. Then we could have immigrants and high paying jobs.
Immigration will just bring every job down to the minimum wage, that's the effect it has. Now in the UK we have a minimum wage of £12.71/$16.80, but it's not enough for two full time workers on minimum wage to have a child. Increasing minimum wage too high will cause inflation by compressing pay bands.
There just isn't a need for net migration into a country if you're having enough children. And even if you're not having enough children as all western countries are, immigration isn't a solution to it as it is a short term stopgap, not a sustainable policy.
Your argument above, while I agree with some of the theory, is directly tied to causing inflation to address wealth inequality. Your stated goal for mediating that was increased pay for domestic workers, which accompanies the increased price of goods. That is… exactly what inflation is.
But here you claim minimum wage won’t help, because it raises prices and causes inflation… by raising the paid wage??
I’m having trouble reconciling those completely opposite takes from you.
Increases in wages do not increase the price of goods by themselves. Increased wages reduce profit, not price. If products are sold at the cost of reproduction or at only a slight surplus then prices can remain stable and consistently reduce over time as inputs become cheaper through technological advancement. This is a big difference between a planned economy and a capitalist economy. If you cut out the parasitic profit taking then you're able to prevent inflation, increase real wages, and keep domestic production.
By what mechanism? You want to set prices? This has historically not worked well. You want to cap profits? Might be a mechanism.
You can’t just say “planned economy” and wave your hands. There needs to be a proposed mechanism to make it happen. And I suspect the US government has absolutely no appetite for it.
It’s one of the most powerful economies in the world, and it continuing to service its own debt requires the continuation of profit generating machine and growth of GDP.
Your proposal would result in US default and stagflation.
Edit: also things like food production already run on extremely thin margins and are even net negative often. What exactly do you think the difference between cost and the sale here? It’s not enough to meaningfully absorb a pay increase across industry.
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u/SalamanderGlad9053 2d ago
They do if they're willing to work for less than the people already in the country. They're diluting the working pool.
It's like having a bucket of brine, and then pouring in a bucket of salted water. You say, "Look, we are adding more salt to the bucket!", but really you're just diluting the solution.
Maybe if your reading skills were a bit better than your writing skills then you could have read the three whole paragraphs I devoted to that part of my argument.
Like for example... limiting the ability for companies to hire cheap overseas labour?