Why would an American business hire an American MBA when they can hire a Philipino MBA from the University of Manila for half the price?
Because the "half the price" guy is going to fall on his face in the face-to-face interview. How many foreign workers do you see serving as the CFO for an American-based company? I'll give you a hint -- not many.
And this is all besides the fact that someday I'm going into business for myself. But hey, you can continue to be pessimistic and assume that they only way to live is to work for someone else!
Luckily, I don't need cosmetic surgery, I was practically blessed with the genes of Adonis. Of course, what this does mean is that when everybody starts scrambling for sales jobs 'cause they look pretty and happen to have a few people skills, I'll walk all over them in the application process 'cause I have a BS in Economics and they don't.
Oh, and I don't need to guarantee that I make some ludicrous wage like $80,000/year because I don't have student loans to repay. I was fuckin' smart enough to land grants and a tuition refund scholarship. All I gotta do is make enough money to live, and then have some amount leftover to pour into small business and/or paper securities.
But you go ahead and have fun with all that nay-saying! I'm sure your external locus of control doesn't do you many favors, but that's why people like you end up working for people like me.
Yeah, that's why I'm not getting my undergraduate degree in fucking business. Economics isn't accounting and calculus is required. Accounting is for fucking calculator jockeys with no perspective. It's all about learning the rules of a particular system as opposed to learning about the principles of resource management. It's keeping the books for somebody who doesn't have their head up their ass...
Well, Microsoft won't make it because everybody won't have no damn money for winblows. Neither will the RIAA because people won't have bullshit money to spend on records at Wal-Mart.
You're only programming for $8/hour because you're part of the labor bubble in technical/computer training that occurred in the 90's (incidentally, almost right in line with the stock market bubble on tech stocks). In short, there's a fucking ton of you coders, especially because for some really weird, like, incomprehensible reason, there is some sort of cultural trend in east asia (including India) where everybody goes to engineering college and studies calculus; it's either electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, or software engineering (computer science).
So, I'm getting my BS in Economics with a minor in Psychology and probably going on to graduate school for an MBA. I'll end up managing you for $15/hour, or doing investment banking or stock brokering for $30/hour, and then I'll have all kinds of fun with my stable of $8/hour programmers (and the $15/hour prostitute).
2) USCIS (The organization that handles all the paper-work for H1 visa or even other immigration) is seriously understaffed to handle any form of processing in a timely and orderly manner.
...
No one seems to offer any solutions to the problems that I have seen. I feel like that person trying to apply for food-stamps after working two jobs and still being denied that basic right because he/she makes just enough money to be above the poverty line.
Well, maybe if we relaxed our immigration and minimum wage restrictions on the labor market, USCIS could hire lots of cheap foreign workers to process the H1-B visa applications!
Oh wait. I think I just realized something.
I fixed the problem too good. Now we don't need USCIS anymore... what could we do with their budget elsewhere? Dump it into the school system? Or research grants on alternative energy civilian transportation solutions?
Gosh, and what could we do with all of these cheap laborers?
Nobody seems to get it though. You better drink the kool-aid.
Or, you could compromise, and just smoke some weed. I mean, there's no reason to freak out, right dude?
You're standing in the way of the New World Order, that's what. Having fifty bazillion different currencies all controlled by fifty bazillion different governments all with fifty bazillion different economic systems is terribly inefficient.
And here's even something more in line with your thinking. Encouraging a black market for foreign labor at the prevailing worldwide wage just means that more companies and more laborers are doing business in other countries, paying taxes into their systems, and thereby making their systems more powerful.
Why do you think all of those people are so desperate to get into America, anyway? It's our far-too-liberal minimum wage and welfare assistance laws... people are scrambling to get in because we overpay for labor in America. If we didn't overpay, they wouldn't care where they worked!
And I have gripes about welfare assistance. Since it scales with the number of children you have, it's effectively a subsidy on childbirth which is not what we need right now. It'd be better to subsidize infertility by paying singles, under a certain level of income, without dependents, a welfare check, and then cutting that welfare if they have a child. But that's another rant and topic entirely. The topic here is immigration.
The summary is that if we weren't idiots, people would pay us more taxes and we would have more power. As it is, our over-zealous application of Keynesian economic principles has lead us into ruin, and now societies like China are gaining power.
Now, I'm not a fan of the system in the United States, but fuck China and fuck communism.
Otherwise, it is highly questionable due to carrying capacity limits.
Unfortunately, you're right about this, but it's a worldwide problem. More people ought to get on board with the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. Again, unfortunately, we're just not programmed to not want to reproduce... regardless of how much room there is in our living room.
In my opinion, though, we could fix the outsourcing problem if we relaxed immigration restrictions and relaxed the minimum wage. Fighting to regulate a market always, always, always produces a black market, and what you're seeing is the black labor market (no pun intended). What we need to do is embrace the nature of the worldwide labor market so that companies continue to do business in America (and therefore pay taxes in America), instead of doing business elsewhere because we don't "allow" people here to work at the prevailing worldwide unskilled wage. That unfortunately just puts power in the hands of other sovereign nations who may quite be less equipped to end the whole idea of national sovereignty.
The NWO really would fix a lot of these problems. We just all need to get on board with one central bank, one currency, and one parliament in order to minimize inefficiencies and wars created by competing systems.
2. I rather suspect that the penalty for supplying false information will be comparably stiff to not supplying it at all, which would seem to be sufficient deterrent.
Not to mention that only an idiot would register someone else's address as his own. A false one, I can see, because the goal of the criminal is to avoid detection. But registering an address that belongs to someone else is the opposite of avoiding detection. In fact it is almost certain to land you in trouble with the law, when Joe Sixpack realizes someone put his e-mail address on a registry list of sex offenders.
Hey, you're a fucking idiot. Do you think I want to compete for your "average unskilled job" that only pays $7/hour? No. Do you think I'm stupid enough to live in a place like Chicago, where living expenses are high due to high real estate values, when I don't have something better than an "average unskilled job" to support myself? No. So quit bitching, turn into a "rational agent," and either train for a better job or move to the fucking rural areas where the cost of living is cheaper and you can live out your life mopping floors, flipping hamburgers, mixing lattes, or whatever brain-dead task it is that you call a "career."
Nobody has ever been under the illusion that you could really live comfortably on a minimum-wage job. That's the motivator that we all have to do well in school, continue our educations, polish our resumes, and apply real jobs.
Don't expect to live a happy life if your "job" is wiping some rich asshole's, well, asshole for him.
"Average unskilled job." Ha. You think I give a fuck?
Why do you think immigration quotas are so important? Defense from invasion is one thing; it prevents economic destruction and theft. Defense from immigration on the other hand is something entirely else: misguided.
I never said the phrase was stupid, though, and I never used Fossett as an example. Again, I was just taking objection to the notion that Astronauts were "bold" when, in the context of the saying, "bold" is used to mean "reckless."
By extension the phrase could be said to mean this: "There are old pilots, and there are reckless pilots, but there are no old reckless pilots."
I figured that since that was the intended meaning of the saying, the saying itself had merit. It implores people to be cautious, which is important.
The rest of this is just a semantic argument over the interpretation of the word "bold."
I think the reality of the situation is that those guys living in those sorts of cramped, unpleasant conditions are not skilled workers. Most of them don't even speak english.
So if they enter the country, yes, the average wage and the cost of labor will both be lowered. However, will wages in your sector be reduced? They'll only be reduced if the immigrants actually add to the pool of labor in your sector. Are they really skilled enough to compete with a college-educated American in the fields of investment banking, software architectural design, or structural engineering?
If the answer is "no," then all that increased immigration means is that the cost of manual labor will be reduced, reducing the cost of all goods made via manual labor, while your wages in whatever skilled field you work in will remain relatively constant. Since your wages remain constant but the influx of cheap labor reduces the cost of goods, your real income increases.
Seriously, do you like paying $5 for a cup of Starbucks coffee that probably has $1 of ingredients? Labor is the greatest expense for most firms and by extension most of the price you see on any product is due to the company's need to recoup the cost of that labor. If hiring some brain-dead barista to stand around mixing lattes was cheaper, lattes would be cheaper, and since you weren't competing for a job in that sector, that means that relatively, with the influx of cheaper labor, you get cheaper lattes.
They aren't outcompeting us yet. But even if they were... so?
There is no such thing as a "below market rate" for labor. The "market rate" is whatever the market is willing to pay, and if people begin making bids on jobs for less, then the market rate falls. No, what you meant to say is, "by accepting below the artificial price-floor rates from companies."
Oh, I get it. You were trying to imply that if they step over the border, somehow they're squatting on the land without paying for it, as though they "stepped into my living room uninvited."
That is a fucking retarded argument. Anybody working here legally pays taxes and those taxes are used to fund the public sector, including roads and schools, so your argument is null there. Additionally, if they walk into the country, they still have to find a place to sleep. If that place happens to be an apartment, then they're paying rent. They didn't just "walk in" and "invade" -- no, it's more like, your neighbor wanted to rent his spare bedroom to a foreigner, at a fair value, and you just stepped in and said "hey asshole! You can't let him live there, and pay money for goods at the same prices that we do! That's MY living room!"
But it isn't. It's my living room. And I'll allow whomever I want to pay rent to live there, thank you very much.
Your point? I don't own a home or vast tracts of land, but if I was selling any I'd be perfectly happy to sell it to whomever could pay the market value... regardless of their country of origin.
I am not scared of competition, just unfair competition. I have to pay a certain amount of money to survive in America. If we open the floodgates to anyone who wants to come and work for awhile, then I have to compete with people who many times live with four people in a two bedroom apartment and send most of the money back home. These people are willing to work for less money.
You mean, they use their time and resources more efficiently than you do? Imagine that. Heh, renting like that over the past few years would have been smart too, considering the housing bubble...
Face it, you use the government to inflate your wages far beyond what you're really worth in today's day and age through artificial controls like immigration restrictions and the minimum wage. It's greed.
And if you really think price floors on labor are necessary, then support that instead of supporting nationalist, xenophobic restrictions on immigration. That's throwing the baby out with the bath water. It fails to address the core issue.
I paid for it. You seem to be suggesting arm-wrestling as a method of resource distribution as opposed to trade and currency exchange. Surely you see the asymmetry in your example. Free trade is not anarchy, and your argument is of the straw man variety.
Lower quality goods only exist because people buy them. There will always be normal goods and inferior goods. But if you lower the costs of any input of production, prices across the board can all be lowered relatively. It won't happen immediately because of sticky prices, but in general when prices are lowered the economy will benefit. It's important to think about the prices of the basket of goods that you buy compared to the amount of money you make, not just the amount of money you make. That's your real income.
Were you really competing for jobs mopping floors, flipping hamburgers, and washing dishes recently? Is it really worth a ~$7 minimum wage to work those jobs? Or are wages (and in turn prices) being artificially inflated by a price floor on labor?
"Small Government" would be not having an H1-B visa program at all, and letting the international labor market work itself out. What we have here is an example of big, irresponsible government.
You're a hypocrite, a mercantilist, a nationalist, and a racist. However, of all the things I do consider you to be, I don't consider you to be a capitalist. Why is that everyone here in "the land of the free" goes on and on about how free markets are the end-all, be-all of economic theory, and yet when it's suggested that we make the labor market a free market, everyone starts bitching?
It's because they're afraid of competition and they're greedy, short-sighted assholes. Why don't you go join China? We don't fucking want you here, hypocrite, and you'd fit in better with those protectionist, isolationist dickwads.
If people could live where ever they wanted, Mexico would long since have been emptied of people.
No, it is protectionist, and the above statement is just fucking retarded for a number of reasons.
If people left Mexico wholesale, then eventually the price of real estate in Mexico would drop. Companies would begin to view that real estate as an attractive investment for developing things like factories, office buildings, nuclear power plants, and so forth. This development would increase the economic viability of the region, create more jobs, and eventually the distribution of people between Mexico and America would equalize.
What is so god-damn important about you and the rest of us "Americans" that we thing we have the god-given right to an artificially inflated wage? Why is it that everyone in America touts capitalist as the be-all, end-all theory of economics, but then when we try to facilitate free and fair competition in the labor market, everyone bitches? Wouldn't that raise the well-being of the average world citizen? And wouldn't a lower cost of labor result in lower prices on all goods, potentially increasing everyone's real income?
It is implicitly protectionist because what we are doing is raising the average well-being of the American citizen by paying them an inflated wage, when we know that we could raise the average well-being of the world citizen at the cost of some well-being to Americans.
The fact that we are not willing to do so means that yes, we are greedy, nationalistic, protectionist, and xenophobic. Believing anything else is rationalizing away the ugly truth about your own morality, or lack of it, and fighting against free competition makes you a hypocrite if you call yourself a capitalist.
Why don't you go join China? I bet you'd fit in great there.
How is free and fair competition in the labor market "invasion?" It's only "invasion" if you're a hypocritical, greedy, short-sighted, protectionist, mercantile, and implicitly racist asshole. You're not a fucking capitalist, you're a joke, and you're scared of competition.
These are supposed to be exceptional people to fill a role that an American CAN NOT do.
And why is that? What is so god damn important about hiring "Americans" when if we just relaxed immigration and labor restrictions, these people could easily be Americans?
You're just nationalistic, protectionist, greedy, and implicitly racist. What is so damn important about you that we have to hire you over everyone else in the world? Because you live here? Because working at an artificially inflated wage is some god-given right you have? What about everyone else?
I thought this was supposed to be the land of modern capitalism, of free and liquid markets (and yes, the labor market is a market). But whenever immigration comes up everyone stops valuing fair competition. Why is that?
And why don't you realize that a lower cost of labor has benefits for the consumer?
Why are Americans such fucking hypocrites? You should go to China, and live there with the rest of the mercantile racists, you fucking dickwad.
So basically, you're a short-sighted greedy asshole and a bad capitalist with no grasp of economics and no appreciation for the benefits of a liquid labor market and a lower cost of labor.
What, are you scared of competition? Are you too uneducated to realize that a lower cost of labor would lead to lower product costs, and in turn to a higher real income for you and everyone else?
Why don't you go to China with the rest of the protectionist, nationalist, mercantile assholes.
It's not that employers can't find qualified citizen candidates, it's just that they don't want to pay a fair and honest wage for Americans to work for them when they can exploit desperate immigrants
America is the land of free markets, competition, and capitalism. What the hell is a "fair and honest" wage, anyway? Isn't a "fair wage" simply the market price for labor?
Isn't it true that when the inputs of production, including labor, are cheaper, products become cheaper as well? And the real income of the average consumer increases?
Calling a free labor market "indentured servitude" is just ignorant. Allowing competition is not indentured servitude. It's globalizing the labor market.
All of this bitching about immigration and pay scale is just anti-competitive and anti-capitalistic. If you want to be a mercantilistic nationalist fuckwad, why don't you go join China with the rest of your kind? We don't want you here in the land of the free.
Well, that's quite nicely nationalistic, protectionist, mercantilist, and implicitly racist of you. What, are you afraid to compete with the whole world? What makes you so damn important? Don't free and liquid markets (including the labor market) result in higher real incomes for the consumer, through competition?
In the birthplace of modern capitalism... you fail at being a capitalist. You're just a despotic fuckwad.
Why don't you go join all of the nationalistic racists in China or North Korea? We don't need you here, fucking everything thing up with your backwards views from the 1850's.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would an American business hire an American MBA when they can hire a Philipino MBA from the University of Manila for half the price?
Because the "half the price" guy is going to fall on his face in the face-to-face interview. How many foreign workers do you see serving as the CFO for an American-based company? I'll give you a hint -- not many.
And this is all besides the fact that someday I'm going into business for myself. But hey, you can continue to be pessimistic and assume that they only way to live is to work for someone else!
Luckily, I don't need cosmetic surgery, I was practically blessed with the genes of Adonis. Of course, what this does mean is that when everybody starts scrambling for sales jobs 'cause they look pretty and happen to have a few people skills, I'll walk all over them in the application process 'cause I have a BS in Economics and they don't.
Oh, and I don't need to guarantee that I make some ludicrous wage like $80,000/year because I don't have student loans to repay. I was fuckin' smart enough to land grants and a tuition refund scholarship. All I gotta do is make enough money to live, and then have some amount leftover to pour into small business and/or paper securities.
But you go ahead and have fun with all that nay-saying! I'm sure your external locus of control doesn't do you many favors, but that's why people like you end up working for people like me.
Yeah, that's why I'm not getting my undergraduate degree in fucking business. Economics isn't accounting and calculus is required. Accounting is for fucking calculator jockeys with no perspective. It's all about learning the rules of a particular system as opposed to learning about the principles of resource management. It's keeping the books for somebody who doesn't have their head up their ass ...
Well, Microsoft won't make it because everybody won't have no damn money for winblows. Neither will the RIAA because people won't have bullshit money to spend on records at Wal-Mart.
You're only programming for $8/hour because you're part of the labor bubble in technical/computer training that occurred in the 90's (incidentally, almost right in line with the stock market bubble on tech stocks). In short, there's a fucking ton of you coders, especially because for some really weird, like, incomprehensible reason, there is some sort of cultural trend in east asia (including India) where everybody goes to engineering college and studies calculus; it's either electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, or software engineering (computer science).
So, I'm getting my BS in Economics with a minor in Psychology and probably going on to graduate school for an MBA. I'll end up managing you for $15/hour, or doing investment banking or stock brokering for $30/hour, and then I'll have all kinds of fun with my stable of $8/hour programmers (and the $15/hour prostitute).
2) USCIS (The organization that handles all the paper-work for H1 visa or even other immigration) is seriously understaffed to handle any form of processing in a timely and orderly manner.
...
No one seems to offer any solutions to the problems that I have seen. I feel like that person trying to apply for food-stamps after working two jobs and still being denied that basic right because he/she makes just enough money to be above the poverty line.
Well, maybe if we relaxed our immigration and minimum wage restrictions on the labor market, USCIS could hire lots of cheap foreign workers to process the H1-B visa applications!
Oh wait. I think I just realized something.
I fixed the problem too good. Now we don't need USCIS anymore ... what could we do with their budget elsewhere? Dump it into the school system? Or research grants on alternative energy civilian transportation solutions?
Gosh, and what could we do with all of these cheap laborers?
Nobody seems to get it though. You better drink the kool-aid.
Or, you could compromise, and just smoke some weed. I mean, there's no reason to freak out, right dude?
You're standing in the way of the New World Order, that's what. Having fifty bazillion different currencies all controlled by fifty bazillion different governments all with fifty bazillion different economic systems is terribly inefficient.
And here's even something more in line with your thinking. Encouraging a black market for foreign labor at the prevailing worldwide wage just means that more companies and more laborers are doing business in other countries, paying taxes into their systems, and thereby making their systems more powerful.
Why do you think all of those people are so desperate to get into America, anyway? It's our far-too-liberal minimum wage and welfare assistance laws ... people are scrambling to get in because we overpay for labor in America. If we didn't overpay, they wouldn't care where they worked!
And I have gripes about welfare assistance. Since it scales with the number of children you have, it's effectively a subsidy on childbirth which is not what we need right now. It'd be better to subsidize infertility by paying singles, under a certain level of income, without dependents, a welfare check, and then cutting that welfare if they have a child. But that's another rant and topic entirely. The topic here is immigration.
The summary is that if we weren't idiots, people would pay us more taxes and we would have more power. As it is, our over-zealous application of Keynesian economic principles has lead us into ruin, and now societies like China are gaining power.
Now, I'm not a fan of the system in the United States, but fuck China and fuck communism.
Otherwise, it is highly questionable due to carrying capacity limits.
Unfortunately, you're right about this, but it's a worldwide problem. More people ought to get on board with the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. Again, unfortunately, we're just not programmed to not want to reproduce ... regardless of how much room there is in our living room.
In my opinion, though, we could fix the outsourcing problem if we relaxed immigration restrictions and relaxed the minimum wage. Fighting to regulate a market always, always, always produces a black market, and what you're seeing is the black labor market (no pun intended). What we need to do is embrace the nature of the worldwide labor market so that companies continue to do business in America (and therefore pay taxes in America), instead of doing business elsewhere because we don't "allow" people here to work at the prevailing worldwide unskilled wage. That unfortunately just puts power in the hands of other sovereign nations who may quite be less equipped to end the whole idea of national sovereignty.
The NWO really would fix a lot of these problems. We just all need to get on board with one central bank, one currency, and one parliament in order to minimize inefficiencies and wars created by competing systems.
2. I rather suspect that the penalty for supplying false information will be comparably stiff to not supplying it at all, which would seem to be sufficient deterrent.
Not to mention that only an idiot would register someone else's address as his own. A false one, I can see, because the goal of the criminal is to avoid detection. But registering an address that belongs to someone else is the opposite of avoiding detection. In fact it is almost certain to land you in trouble with the law, when Joe Sixpack realizes someone put his e-mail address on a registry list of sex offenders.
Hey, you're a fucking idiot. Do you think I want to compete for your "average unskilled job" that only pays $7/hour? No. Do you think I'm stupid enough to live in a place like Chicago, where living expenses are high due to high real estate values, when I don't have something better than an "average unskilled job" to support myself? No. So quit bitching, turn into a "rational agent," and either train for a better job or move to the fucking rural areas where the cost of living is cheaper and you can live out your life mopping floors, flipping hamburgers, mixing lattes, or whatever brain-dead task it is that you call a "career."
Nobody has ever been under the illusion that you could really live comfortably on a minimum-wage job. That's the motivator that we all have to do well in school, continue our educations, polish our resumes, and apply real jobs.
Don't expect to live a happy life if your "job" is wiping some rich asshole's, well, asshole for him.
"Average unskilled job." Ha. You think I give a fuck?
Why do you think immigration quotas are so important? Defense from invasion is one thing; it prevents economic destruction and theft. Defense from immigration on the other hand is something entirely else: misguided.
I never said the phrase was stupid, though, and I never used Fossett as an example. Again, I was just taking objection to the notion that Astronauts were "bold" when, in the context of the saying, "bold" is used to mean "reckless."
By extension the phrase could be said to mean this: "There are old pilots, and there are reckless pilots, but there are no old reckless pilots."
I figured that since that was the intended meaning of the saying, the saying itself had merit. It implores people to be cautious, which is important.
The rest of this is just a semantic argument over the interpretation of the word "bold."
I think the reality of the situation is that those guys living in those sorts of cramped, unpleasant conditions are not skilled workers. Most of them don't even speak english.
So if they enter the country, yes, the average wage and the cost of labor will both be lowered. However, will wages in your sector be reduced? They'll only be reduced if the immigrants actually add to the pool of labor in your sector. Are they really skilled enough to compete with a college-educated American in the fields of investment banking, software architectural design, or structural engineering?
If the answer is "no," then all that increased immigration means is that the cost of manual labor will be reduced, reducing the cost of all goods made via manual labor, while your wages in whatever skilled field you work in will remain relatively constant. Since your wages remain constant but the influx of cheap labor reduces the cost of goods, your real income increases.
Seriously, do you like paying $5 for a cup of Starbucks coffee that probably has $1 of ingredients? Labor is the greatest expense for most firms and by extension most of the price you see on any product is due to the company's need to recoup the cost of that labor. If hiring some brain-dead barista to stand around mixing lattes was cheaper, lattes would be cheaper, and since you weren't competing for a job in that sector, that means that relatively, with the influx of cheaper labor, you get cheaper lattes.
They aren't outcompeting us yet. But even if they were ... so?
There is no such thing as a "below market rate" for labor. The "market rate" is whatever the market is willing to pay, and if people begin making bids on jobs for less, then the market rate falls. No, what you meant to say is, "by accepting below the artificial price-floor rates from companies."
The nanny state strikes again.
Oh, I get it. You were trying to imply that if they step over the border, somehow they're squatting on the land without paying for it, as though they "stepped into my living room uninvited."
That is a fucking retarded argument. Anybody working here legally pays taxes and those taxes are used to fund the public sector, including roads and schools, so your argument is null there. Additionally, if they walk into the country, they still have to find a place to sleep. If that place happens to be an apartment, then they're paying rent. They didn't just "walk in" and "invade" -- no, it's more like, your neighbor wanted to rent his spare bedroom to a foreigner, at a fair value, and you just stepped in and said "hey asshole! You can't let him live there, and pay money for goods at the same prices that we do! That's MY living room!"
But it isn't. It's my living room. And I'll allow whomever I want to pay rent to live there, thank you very much.
Dickhead.
Your point? I don't own a home or vast tracts of land, but if I was selling any I'd be perfectly happy to sell it to whomever could pay the market value ... regardless of their country of origin.
Get a coherent argument.
I am not scared of competition, just unfair competition. I have to pay a certain amount of money to survive in America. If we open the floodgates to anyone who wants to come and work for awhile, then I have to compete with people who many times live with four people in a two bedroom apartment and send most of the money back home. These people are willing to work for less money.
You mean, they use their time and resources more efficiently than you do? Imagine that. Heh, renting like that over the past few years would have been smart too, considering the housing bubble ...
Face it, you use the government to inflate your wages far beyond what you're really worth in today's day and age through artificial controls like immigration restrictions and the minimum wage. It's greed.
And if you really think price floors on labor are necessary, then support that instead of supporting nationalist, xenophobic restrictions on immigration. That's throwing the baby out with the bath water. It fails to address the core issue.
I paid for it. You seem to be suggesting arm-wrestling as a method of resource distribution as opposed to trade and currency exchange. Surely you see the asymmetry in your example. Free trade is not anarchy, and your argument is of the straw man variety.
Lower quality goods only exist because people buy them. There will always be normal goods and inferior goods. But if you lower the costs of any input of production, prices across the board can all be lowered relatively. It won't happen immediately because of sticky prices, but in general when prices are lowered the economy will benefit. It's important to think about the prices of the basket of goods that you buy compared to the amount of money you make, not just the amount of money you make. That's your real income.
Were you really competing for jobs mopping floors, flipping hamburgers, and washing dishes recently? Is it really worth a ~$7 minimum wage to work those jobs? Or are wages (and in turn prices) being artificially inflated by a price floor on labor?
Small Government makes all things right, eh?
"Small Government" would be not having an H1-B visa program at all, and letting the international labor market work itself out. What we have here is an example of big, irresponsible government.
You're a hypocrite, a mercantilist, a nationalist, and a racist. However, of all the things I do consider you to be, I don't consider you to be a capitalist. Why is that everyone here in "the land of the free" goes on and on about how free markets are the end-all, be-all of economic theory, and yet when it's suggested that we make the labor market a free market, everyone starts bitching?
It's because they're afraid of competition and they're greedy, short-sighted assholes. Why don't you go join China? We don't fucking want you here, hypocrite, and you'd fit in better with those protectionist, isolationist dickwads.
If people could live where ever they wanted, Mexico would long since have been emptied of people.
No, it is protectionist, and the above statement is just fucking retarded for a number of reasons.
If people left Mexico wholesale, then eventually the price of real estate in Mexico would drop. Companies would begin to view that real estate as an attractive investment for developing things like factories, office buildings, nuclear power plants, and so forth. This development would increase the economic viability of the region, create more jobs, and eventually the distribution of people between Mexico and America would equalize.
What is so god-damn important about you and the rest of us "Americans" that we thing we have the god-given right to an artificially inflated wage? Why is it that everyone in America touts capitalist as the be-all, end-all theory of economics, but then when we try to facilitate free and fair competition in the labor market, everyone bitches? Wouldn't that raise the well-being of the average world citizen? And wouldn't a lower cost of labor result in lower prices on all goods, potentially increasing everyone's real income?
It is implicitly protectionist because what we are doing is raising the average well-being of the American citizen by paying them an inflated wage, when we know that we could raise the average well-being of the world citizen at the cost of some well-being to Americans.
The fact that we are not willing to do so means that yes, we are greedy, nationalistic, protectionist, and xenophobic. Believing anything else is rationalizing away the ugly truth about your own morality, or lack of it, and fighting against free competition makes you a hypocrite if you call yourself a capitalist.
Why don't you go join China? I bet you'd fit in great there.
How is free and fair competition in the labor market "invasion?" It's only "invasion" if you're a hypocritical, greedy, short-sighted, protectionist, mercantile, and implicitly racist asshole. You're not a fucking capitalist, you're a joke, and you're scared of competition.
These are supposed to be exceptional people to fill a role that an American CAN NOT do.
And why is that? What is so god damn important about hiring "Americans" when if we just relaxed immigration and labor restrictions, these people could easily be Americans?
You're just nationalistic, protectionist, greedy, and implicitly racist. What is so damn important about you that we have to hire you over everyone else in the world? Because you live here? Because working at an artificially inflated wage is some god-given right you have? What about everyone else?
I thought this was supposed to be the land of modern capitalism, of free and liquid markets (and yes, the labor market is a market). But whenever immigration comes up everyone stops valuing fair competition. Why is that?
And why don't you realize that a lower cost of labor has benefits for the consumer?
Why are Americans such fucking hypocrites? You should go to China, and live there with the rest of the mercantile racists, you fucking dickwad.
So basically, you're a short-sighted greedy asshole and a bad capitalist with no grasp of economics and no appreciation for the benefits of a liquid labor market and a lower cost of labor.
What, are you scared of competition? Are you too uneducated to realize that a lower cost of labor would lead to lower product costs, and in turn to a higher real income for you and everyone else?
Why don't you go to China with the rest of the protectionist, nationalist, mercantile assholes.
It's not that employers can't find qualified citizen candidates, it's just that they don't want to pay a fair and honest wage for Americans to work for them when they can exploit desperate immigrants
America is the land of free markets, competition, and capitalism. What the hell is a "fair and honest" wage, anyway? Isn't a "fair wage" simply the market price for labor?
Isn't it true that when the inputs of production, including labor, are cheaper, products become cheaper as well? And the real income of the average consumer increases?
Calling a free labor market "indentured servitude" is just ignorant. Allowing competition is not indentured servitude. It's globalizing the labor market.
All of this bitching about immigration and pay scale is just anti-competitive and anti-capitalistic. If you want to be a mercantilistic nationalist fuckwad, why don't you go join China with the rest of your kind? We don't want you here in the land of the free.
Well, that's quite nicely nationalistic, protectionist, mercantilist, and implicitly racist of you. What, are you afraid to compete with the whole world? What makes you so damn important? Don't free and liquid markets (including the labor market) result in higher real incomes for the consumer, through competition?
In the birthplace of modern capitalism ... you fail at being a capitalist. You're just a despotic fuckwad.
Why don't you go join all of the nationalistic racists in China or North Korea? We don't need you here, fucking everything thing up with your backwards views from the 1850's.
How is allowing more immigration an abuse? What they ought to do is "expand" it by abolishing restrictions entirely.