Comment by llamaimperative 2 days ago
Just further evidence of the accelerating returns to capital. It just makes less and less sense for America to be engaged in highly wealth-distributive (i.e. labor intensive) activities, more sense for it to engage in capital-intensive ones which, by definition, accrue further benefit to the owners of that capital. Yikes!
They will keep crying that, no matter the actual labor market situation. My country has low wages, high unemployment, and yet businesses similarly cry for more immigration, as they always want to find the most desperate worker who accepts the lowest wage possible. That's the reality of modern capitalism.
Of course they are humans like everybody else. But I do not support mass migration as a tool for bringing the wages further down and exploiting workers. I think the rich should be taxed much more, and that money used to reduce poverty & improve education globally. It's not migration itself that is the problem, but the fact many migrants are in a position where they can be exploited more easily than native workers.
In ideal world businesses would have to pay a fair livable wage, no matter where they build factories, or receive migrants from.
Mass migration would bring their wages _up_, not down. That's why they would migrate.
> It's not migration itself that is the problem, but the fact many migrants are in a position where they can be exploited more easily than native workers.
Well, if you let people migrate easily and legally, they wouldn't be easier to exploit than native workers.
Why wouldn’t you want cheaper labor to the extent you need it at all?
Nobody would be investing in labor intensive industry because it doesn't return as well, so there would be a huge oversupply of labor, so prices would already be at their floor.
That doesn't seem to be what's happening though.
Economic systems aren't typically describable with terms like "nobody." There's an equilibrium in investment levels between capital- and labor-intensive sectors, and that equilibrium is moving. If there was a huge oversupply of labor, then it'd make it more compelling to invest in labor-intensive sectors, which would both shift the equilibrium and eliminate the oversupply (which is what has already happened/is happening every hour of every day, thus there's no massive oversupply).
But industry cries out for more immigration to suppress wages because they don't have enough workers (or at least, not enough leverage in the labor market as they would like), so I'm not sure if that tracks.