Donald Trump took to Truth Social to call on ICE officials to expand efforts to “detain Illegal Aliens” in cities at the “core of Democrat Power Center.” It comes after deportations in Los Angeles sparked protests.
Donald Trump took to Truth Social to call on ICE officials to expand efforts to “detain Illegal Aliens” in cities at the “core of Democrat Power Center.” It comes after deportations in Los Angeles sparked protests.
In the short term, this will hurt sectors of the economy, but in the long term, won’t this raise wages for pretty much everyone in the blue states / cities they focus on?
No. They will close down, cut their losses and do something else. While letting everything they grew rot on the ground.
In the short term it doesn’t matter. Eventually some other company or smaller scale farmer will fill the void.
This is why I said short term it is harmful.
Long term, the market will grow and adapt.
Neoliberal economic understanding of how things work is patently false to the point of being fabricated lies.
How? He’s attacking minimum wage jobs.
Immigrants are part of what makes our country great, so don’t misread me here, but by getting rid of illegal immigrants it would force folks who skirt employment laws and wage laws,
Those folks would still need workers and would have to pay a lot more for their labor…
If there is suddenly a 5% loss or whatever the number of illegal immigrants in that sector or what not, employers will have to compete a lot more for the workers….
Wages would go up for all.
If you do it randomly and all at once, it can really hurt a bunch of sectors of the economy… but over time those sectors will figure how to make it work and the blue states in this scenario will be doing even better than they already are now compared to red states
Edit: I actually got this idea from Bernie
In florida years ago, when e-verify was being pushed, and tomato farm operations had to verify social security numbers for their employees, they didnt start paying legal/competitive wages- they just left tomatoes on the vines to rot - and then took subsidies and tax breaks for operating those farms at a loss. some agriculture companies just got out of the tomato business altogether.
employers at the largest levels don’t care about construction, or farming or whatever- they care about profit. the investors don’t care about the work their companies perform- if a sector becomes significantly less profitable because of a lack of immigrant workers, they don’t just take a hit to their profits and move on, they pull their investments and find another business to invest in. there will plainly be less construction firms, less farms, less local restaurants able to compete with the chains.
the money in this economy is hoarded by the upper class- they can control how businesses operate, and because the rest of us have limited buying power, our choices are dictated more by what we can afford than what we need or want. demand in this economy has power, but it is easily overwhelmed by control of the supply by purely profit motivated investors.
they dont want to make less money selling higher priced tomatoes, and at the same time, we dont have the available income to budget for higher priced tomatoes, from the largest or smaller farms, and will just shift spending to other cheap food we can afford in our budgets. lots of businesses will close but the investors- who most elected officials serve- will just invest elsewhere, which is why they don’t care about the impact on the rest of us. large operations will gobble up the failing smaller ones, consumer options will continue to shrink, and the people we’ve been exploiting for their labor will lose their source of income.
there will be no industry-wide rise in low wages, just diminishing supply. eventually the tariffs will go, and then supply will be replaced by (even cheaper) foreign production.
It makes smaller farmers get more of the market share….
Most neoliberal concepts of how the economy work are pretty much fabricated wholesale.
Unfortunately, smaller farmers are nearly extinct due to fed refusal to enforce anti-trust law and Bork (may he rest in piss) ruling that consolidation magically improved the customer experience.
In short, no.
The profit motive does not allow for this.
There is a reason red states are trying to choose back child labor laws.
In all honesty, this will probably result in more prison labor and a greater profit motive to lock up more people.
lol… anything to max profits without any meaningful legislation. I hear you.
We need immigration reform… we’ve needed it since I was on the debate team in high school lmao…
I don’t think there are enough prisoners to make up for the illegal immigrant and under the board wage slavery our country has us in. (A hard working immigrant, for example, is going to maximize the process of picking tomatoes or radishes or whatever it is way better than any prison population is going to do.)
But… I’m going to remain optimistic and hopeful this can push us towards actual immigration reform… deporting undocumented immigrants who have lived hear since before they could speak English, let alone Spanish is fucking stupid.
I didn’t downvote you but in general it’s just going to kill industries and make shit more expensive.
That’s why we need real immigration reform. Illegal workers getting paid unfair wages really is a big problem that is bringing down wages for all
Not in general, no. Likely the opposite, I think, but there are so many complex interactions I wouldn’t trust anyone giving a definitive answer.
In general, undocumented immigrants do work that citizens are unwilling to do, and they’re generally paid so little that they produce a lot more value than they’re paid in wages. So, for example, produce prices will likely skyrocket when they can’t get undocumented immigrants picking their produce for cheap. This will squeeze wages up the entire supply chain and, due to inflation, real wages across the whole economy. This will also make American produce less competitive internationally, reducing exports.
The labour instability will also increase business uncertainty, which will reduce investment, which will further reduce economic growth.
Sure, there are a few people who might benefit, but mostly this will just mean there’s less total economic output. If people can’t hire a house cleaner, they’ll just have a messier house and get it cleaned less frequently (or do it themselves, potentially in lieu of doing other paid work). Are you or anyone you know going to move rural to pick lettuce? Or clean houses? Or sew clothing? (Etc. across all the “undesirable” jobs across the economy.)
In general, I don’t care whether anyone wants the job or not, it still needs to be paying a living wage.
Which is why we need immigration reform so we don’t have a class of folks who are really important for our economy who are considered illegal. It’s ridiculous.
But we also can not have the status quo where we are randomly separating families and doing raids and what not. We can’t have what we had before this either, we need immigration reform. It will raise wages and allow folks a path to citizenship.