TheAgitator.com
Howley on Guest Workers
Monday, December 24th, 2007Read my colleague Kerry Howley’s terrific cover story on Singapore’s guest worker program from our January issue.
America ought to learn from this. Often lost in the immigration debate is the fact that there’s a huge demand for unskilled labor in this country, and a huge supply of unskilled labor just to our south. But there is no legal way for a Mexican laborer to come to the U.S. to work. Build all the fences you want. Supply will find a way to meet demand.
The problem with applying Singapore’s guest worker system here is the harshness of the Singapore system. It is the harshness that makes the system workable for Singapore, and without that you essentially have the current immigration system in place in the US.
I’m also suprised that you would find a system where a worker is essentially indentured to one employer via government actions somehow worthy of praise.
I don’t think we should replicate it. But we ought to learn from it. We need a system where low-skill laborers can legally come here to work. It needn’t resemble Singapore’s.
I guess I would then challenge your assertion that we ‘need’ to import low-skill workers. Black teen unemployment is running over 30%. Black unemployment is over 10%. I don’t think it’s a stretch that the folks on the margins of employment are most likely low-skill, and that we are effectively hurting the most vulnerable populations of US citizens by importing more workers to compete against them. It is made even worse because openings in low-skill positions aren’t always advertised. They are instead filled thru referrals from current employees. If a job site is staffed with immigrants, are they more likely to refer their friend from the old country or some guy down the block? So not only are low-skill wages depressed by increasing the supply, but natives are frozen out of significant segments of the job market. They then don’t get to appreciate their skills thru the job they hold so that they aren’t ‘low’ skilled and are stuck in the underclass longer.
Also, if people are turning to street-level drug dealing because they can’t get access to the above-ground economy aren’t we making the effects of the drug war worse by not slowing down the flow of low-skill immigrants?
I would like to see just for once one of you at Reason concede Milton Friedman’s point that it is absolutely moronic to have an open immigration policy and a welfare state at the same time. You cannot get rid of the latter if you have the former.
I would like to see just once one of you pro-government types concede that if there is a problem caused by government intervention (Welfare). That it is absolutely moronic to expect the government to solve the problem by more intervention.
DJB,
Yes, it is “pro-government” to say that it is moronic for libertarians to open up the borders while the welfare state not only exists, but is open to every Tom, Dick and Harry who comes here.
I agree with Friedman, who is in his current state a far more thoughtful person than the libertarian who supports open borders, that it is a fool’s errand to open up the floodgates when you have no guarantee that these low and unskilled workers won’t become welfare leeches.
So now the onus is on you to explain how open borders policies will make it easier to bring down the welfare state, aside from overloading it and making it collapse.
Funny thing about those of you who cite the studies that say that illegal immigrants are not drains on the public services… is that cannot logically apply to the education system. The vast majority of illegal immigrants do not own property that falls under the property tax other than old cars. Every child that they enroll in a public school in a state like Virginia is about $7,500 of tax dollars that their family eats up. In some states, that’s as much as $10,000-$11,000.
I find it very hard to believe that the majority of the illegal immigrants with children here are contributing as much or more than they are taking out of at least the public education system, if not other government services.
A smart guest worker program would presumably require employers to make some sort of payment for the services their workers use. And guest workers would be much more likely to pay their taxes than illegal immigrants.
And its too bad that black teenagers have a high unemployment, but I sincerely doubt they would want to pick cabbage in the south. I sure as hell wouldn’t have wanted to when I was a teenager.
It would be nice if we could both get rid of the welfare state and allow anybody who wanted to immigrate here, but in the political climate we actually have, a guest worker program makes a lot more sense then a border fence or a bunch of retired rednecks guarding the border.
How about we start up a system where people living on welfare can perform these jobs that require unskilled workers? If there are still open jobs left over, then we can import them from other countries and they can be legal citizens just like they’re supposed to be.
If you come here illegally, no handouts, the only thing you get for free is a ride to the border. Oh, and take your kids with you, we don’t want to pay for them either, not to mention it will save us on bleeding heart “break up the family” stories.
Of course my real world prediction is that we’ll solve our immigration “problem” in another manner entirely. We’ll debase our currency so badly that no one will want to come here and work for dollars anymore. Our standard of living will be poor enough, for the poor at least, that people in Mexico (or anywhere else for that matter) won’t see any big advantage to coming here. Yeah, it’s going to take some time, but our government is doing it’s best to get us there as fast as they can. I wonder, when the US collapses, how we’ll break apart?
Guests are invited.
Illegals are invaders! Criminals as well!
I know that a guest is, it know how to treat a guest I as well know how to be a guest, today we suffer from 20 million criminals amongst us.
Immigrants are neither the cause of the welfare state nor a significant abuser of the welfare system. If your argument is against the presence of the welfare state then your anger is misplaced.
Mike T,
“Funny thing about those of you who cite the studies that say that illegal immigrants are not drains on the public services… is that cannot logically apply to the education system. The vast majority of illegal immigrants do not own property that falls under the property tax other than old cars. Every child that they enroll in a public school in a state like Virginia is about $7,500 of tax dollars that their family eats up. In some states, that’s as much as $10,000-$11,000.”
This is almost certainly wrong in that the $ amounts given are likely to be average costs, not marginal costs. As long as the additional pupil load doesn’t require the building of new facilities, or the addition of new classes, the average costs will be a gross overstatement.
Also, guest workers are not the same as guest families. If entry and re-entry is eased, most workers are likely to be seasonal and not want to dilute their earnings by having to provide for their families at US prices.
Regards, Don
Immigrants are neither the cause of the welfare state nor a significant abuser of the welfare system. If your argument is against the presence of the welfare state then your anger is misplaced.
It does not matter that they are not the cause of the welfare state. In fact, that is a terrible non sequitor. What matters is that under our current system, the judiciary has asserted that illegal immigrants are entitled to all welfare and non-welfare public services. That means they can enroll their kids to the tune of about $7,000-$11,000 of tax dollars per year in public schools. Even if few of them ever tap welfare or medicare/medicaid, many of them will tap the public school system, and that is every bit part of the welfare state!
If you want a future where there is no welfare state, ranging from EIC, to no public schools, then allowing millions of more people who will want those things to flood the country is not going to help things.
My anger is actually placed mostly at the government, not the immigrants. I have no desire to see Mexico or other countries suffer from poverty. I also have no desire to see America flooded by every Tom, Dick and Harry who just wants to work hard. Wanting to work hard is in no way connected to traditional American political and social values. There are plenty of Islamists in Saudi Arabia who would love to work hard. Want to invite tens of thousands more Wahabis to live in America and vote in our elections eventually? What I want is a system that says that anyone who is willing to work hard and live in peace can come here, but not just anyone can be a citizen of the United States. I do not want people born in collectivist countries, who probably have no intentions of changing their values, to have any political power in America.
The whole system is designed today to keep the immigrants down, turn them against the citizenry, enrich the connected interests, and dilute the native, more liberty-loving vote with votes from collectivist foreigners.
The levels of immigration we are seeing today are unsustainable under our current system. That is why it is imperative that we get control over them now, reform the naturalization process, impeach all of the judges who have reading comprehension problems with the Constitution, and eliminate the welfare state before the laws that govern guest workers are liberalized. You cannot take millions of immigrants from failed, collectivist states over the course of less than a generation, and not expect there to be the potential for dire changes to the country in a collectivist direction because the immigrants simply cannot be absorbed in such numbers. There is another term for this phenomenon, a migration, and historically, those do not end well for the society that is on the receiving end.
You know what would be interesting? Seeing a real debate between an open borders libertarian from Reason and a libertarian who is not in favor of such a policy like Ilana Mercer or Vox Day.
MikeT,
I think apartments and rental homes generate property tax as well–paid by the owner and usually factored into rent.
Since we can’t adopt restrictive covenants in our communities, the next best thing is to have majority-voted-upon laws that express our collective wishes. Because it’s not “free” for people to be allowed to move into my neighborhood, speak a foreign language, send their kids to schools I pay for, commit crimes and go to jail that I’ll pay for, when I can’t adopt a civil law contract to keep them out. Because a “free society” without the right to exclude and form voluntary based communities with like-minded people of similar levels of education, wealth, social class, and ethnicity and culture is not free at all. Not everyone would want to live in an all white or mostly white community, through judging by how people behave when they have kids they do so tacitly through “white flight.” But, regardless, no one exercise of freedom of choice should be considered more or less valuable to the laws than another. As the Austrians teach us, marginal value and idiosyncratic preferences are a key factor in economic and social life. And who one lives next to and around is very important, but it’s something the socially engineered mass immigration policies give us little say over.
I am firmly of the opinion that any immigration to this country should be highly selective and there are far too many open questions about a guest worker program that are unresolved (i.e. citizenship for children of these workers who are born in the US). And, frankly, it seems to me to be heartbreakingly ill-advised to bring in low-cost competition to our least skilled citizens, many of whom are under-employed at best and finding competition increasingly difficult as our society and technology advances.
To address the post in question: Correct, Mr. Balko. Supply will find a way to meet demand – however that is the function of prices in the marketplace, not necessarily a guest work program.
Without a guest worker program or illegal immigration, if labor supply does not meet demand the price of labor will rise (i.e. salaries will rise) until it can attract enough labor to fulfill demand. The advantage to America is higher wages for lower-skilled citizens and more of these workers getting off public (i.e. tax payer supported) subsidy.
Of course this would mean that producers will try to pass along all, if they can, of this cost increase to consumers. These consumers will have some if not all of this increase offset by reduced costs on public services and other illegal/guest worker immigration cost accruals in the economy.
However, at some point, producers will substitute capital for labor and invest in technologies to make production more efficient to recapture lost profits and sales (especially if consumers begin to substitute goods due to increased costs).
This investment in productivity allows producers to do more with less. A developed nation should rely less and less, although it will never reduce to zero, on unskilled labor over time. (Admittedly xenophobic nations like Japan and South Korea are the best examples of this.)
By allowing illegal immigration or a low-skilled guest worker program, the government creates a disincentive for producers to look for productivity efficiencies. This is why business is generally supportive of open immigration of low-skilled workers, its cheaper to squeeze wages by inflating the labor supply than make the more uncertain and difficult longer-term investments in technology.
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