Usually when supply is greater than demand, the price goes down.
If you tore some down but still had the same type of housing availability, the town would look better and cost should remain relatively similar.
University of Iowa business professor predicts harm to Iowa towns from Trump immigration policies
- Thread starter torbee
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If you tore some down but still had the same type of housing availability, the town would look better and cost should remain relatively similar.
Which party opposes minimum wage increases? Where are the significant consequences for companies that employ these illegal immigrants?
My guess is meat packing plant workers make double minimum wage.
When McDonald’s pays $15 an hour you would be hard pressed finding a job that paid minimum wage.
Obviously wages aren't high enough for Americans to be interested in working at packing plants. Maybe if the companies hiring illegal workers suffered significant consequences they would consider raising their wages to attract legal workers.
I would say both parties oppose minimum wage as I haven’t seen any sort of beneficial increase come from either party. Plus, why the heck would you raise it right now when it’s made up of illegals performing the work. Companies don’t have any consequences anymore. They used to conduct ICE raids on this sort of stuff but it was shut down. Not sure why. Probably hurt someone’s feelings.
Come on now, we all know which party opposes raising the minimum wage.
ICE raids punish the workers not the employers. Employers are the problem.
ICE raids should be punishing the Employer and the illegals. I’m sure it punishes the worker as well when they are left with no co-workers but that’s also probably a part of American citizen not wanting to work these jobs. I wouldn’t want to work with someone I know is illegal and most likely isn’t speaking English and who knows how reliable they are. Pay isn’t the only reason Americans don’t work these jobs
Didn't you all bitch about food prices? What do you think will happen to the cost of meat?…..
Gems like this in Marshalltown would go unsold?
Maybe tearing them down and increased wages at the meat packing plant would be acceptable.
I do. It seems like you don't. If everyone who wants a job has one, then there is nobody else to do the shit jobs. Hence the need for illegals.
How about short term pain and long term pain?
After an ICE raid, few Americans showed up to work at this Texas meatpacking plant
Despite a high demand for workers and attractive wages, few Americans sign up to do the grueling work at the JBS USA meatpacking plant in deep-red Cactus.
www.texastribune.org
That's not how it's worked out before.
This might be a good argument if having illegals here was keeping the price of food down currently.
Should is the problem. If employers didn't hire illegal workers immigration would lessen significantly.
We’re already there buddy. Happened with Covid and when Biden took over. Short term and long term.
And if someone or something tried to stop immigration, employers would hire less illegals. Goes both ways just like you.
The number one industry for illegals is construction. Take them away, the houses don't get built. And home prices rise due to lack of inventory. Pretty sure the economist already factored that in.Ya, but he is an economist so whatever he says has to be correct.
Wants a job and needs a job are two different things,.. And this idea that there is a defined list of "shit" jobs in this country is exactly what drives the lie that we've been feeding to high school students for the past two generations...
Do you ever wonder where houses and businesses came from before illegals built them? I can’t believe how many of them existed either considering how much they must have cost.
A decent paying job in carpentry might be a good career path for some instead of “living off the government” but why would they want to do some of these jobs if they can collect the same amount of money not working.
After an ICE raid, few Americans showed up to work at this Texas meatpacking plant
Despite a high demand for workers and attractive wages, few Americans sign up to do the grueling work at the JBS USA meatpacking plant in deep-red Cactus.
That's not how it's worked out before.
You seem to think this can be fixed overnight?,.. Will take years to correct the problem that we've created by allowing an illegal criminal underclass to permeate the economy.
I always pay myself first in terms of retirement savings.
If things cost more I eat less steak and dine out less. Maybe my car has a fewer bells and whistles.
Order chicken in the steak is too high. Cook your own steak at home for less than it cost in a restaurant before crazy inflation. I can’t remember to the last time I ordered a steak, I can make a perfect one at home using reverse sear for 1/2 the price.
People make choices everyday and don’t even know it.
The less food processing involved the less the price is affected. Make your own dishes and stop depending on boxes.
Society got drunk on cheap, often illegal labor. Time to sober up.
This chaos is also imposing record costs on Americans. Last year, FAIR published a report entitled theFiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers. The study strives to illustrate themyriad of ways Americans pay for illegal immigration. Our estimate, which is a conservative one, is thatAmericans now pay $150.7 billion dollars annually due to illegal immigration. This figure represents anet cost. In terms of gross expenditures due to illegal immigration, we estimate that Americans pay$182 billion. Approximately $31 billion is received from illegal aliens in taxes, only 17 percent of thecosts they create.The fiscal burden of illegal immigration is due to several factors. First, because illegal aliens usually havelow incomes, those who do pay taxes pay little, if anything. Second, illegal aliens incur significant coststo the taxpayer on a daily basis, because public services such as policing, K-12 education, emergencyservices, etc., are provided universally. Further, due to loose eligibility criteria – intentional or otherwise– many illegal aliens receive benefits from federal, state, and local jurisdictions, despite the fact thatthey have no legal status.The majority of costs are incurred at the state and local level. The predominant cost at the state andlocal level is K-12 education of the children of illegal aliens, which costs taxpayers roughly $70 billioneach year. This estimate covers the education of children with no legal status and U.S.-born children.The second highest expenditure for illegal aliens at the state level is medical expenditures, which weestimate to be approximately $22 billion annually. This figure includes costs attributable touncompensated medical care, improper Medicaid payouts, Medicaid for citizen children of illegal aliens,and certain state laws that provide Medicaid coverage for illegal aliens.
he doesn't own meat packing plants, but does he hire illegals at his golf clubs? who knows
somebody got paid off or something. prior to this, in the 80's, you had to be union and legal, to work there. something happened in the 90's maybe or early 2000's. blame bush or clinton maybe?
Take the illegals away, and that opens up a bunch of housing for the people that remain. It literally says in one paragraph that housing costs could go up, and housing costs could go down. No $hit. That is the point that we are mocking in the article.
Kind of like how funny it is to see democrats that were clamoring for a $15 minimum wage now bemoaning policy that will raise blue collar wages.
These activities are typically dictated by the administration in power,... Limited by the extent to which they wish to enforce current immigration law...
Some local workers will get paid higher wages, while others will pick up some additional overtime (and hopefully tax free).
Both will probably spend more in town than the illegals, who will likely send much of the money home.
Ten million people in 4 years is way more immigration that what would ever be required. Did the U.S. economy implode prior to Biden? But nice try, keep throwing things to see if anything sticks.
Even when they were happening employers are rarely punished for their hiring practice and when they are it's a slap on wrist.
Fewer than a dozen. That’s how many employers were prosecuted in fiscal year 2023 for hiring immigrants who did not have proper documentation, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
That fact gets at a frustrating aspect of our immigration debate: While legislators on both sides are focused on trying to stop the record number of people illegally crossing the U.S. border, almost no one is talking about the economic incentives drawing them here. And the businesses creating those incentives rarely face any consequences if they fail to verify the legal status of their workers.
The last sweeping rewrite of immigration law, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, is mostly remembered for the path to citizenship it created for an estimated 3 million people, mostly of Hispanic origin, who for years had been living in the shadows. But its most contentious provision was one that, for the first time, imposed criminal and civil penalties on employers who knowingly hire a worker who is not in the country legally.
Before then, it had been a felony to harbor an undocumented immigrant, but the 1952 “Texas Proviso” stipulated that employing one did not violate the law. The 1986 law set out civil fines for employers who hire undocumented workers and criminal penalties, including imprisonment, for those who show a “pattern or practice” of violations.
But those penalties are rarely imposed, as Syracuse University’s data shows. By comparison, there were nearly 1,300 cases in which migrants were prosecuted for illegally entering the country and more than 6,000 prosecutions for what the law describes as “bringing in and harboring certain aliens.”
Lesser penalties against employers are also rare. Civil fines may range from $250 to $10,000 per employee; criminal ones can reach $50,000 per employee. But in fiscal 2022, both criminal and civil fines totaled only $23 million, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s annual report to Congress. Annual figures vary widely, but they surely represent a minuscule portion of violations that occur.
So employers have little fear of paying any price for violating the law. The vast majority of government resources has always gone toward securing the border, rather than enforcing it in the workplace.
Why is that? As the authors of the 1986 act, former senator Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.) and former congressman Romano L. Mazzoli (D-Ky.), wrote in The Post two decades after its enactment: “One answer is that there are never enough federal budget resources. Another is that administrations of both stripes are loathe to disrupt economic activities — i.e. labor supply in factories, farms and businesses. And we know that disruptions in the labor supply are the natural, unavoidable and even desirable consequence of strong border and workplace enforcement.”
In 2017, then-President Donald Trump commuted the 27-year prison sentence of Sholom Rubashkin, former chief executive of what was once the country’s largest kosher meatpacking plant. A massive 2008 immigration raid on his family-owned slaughterhouse in Iowa rounded up 389 undocumented immigrants, some as young as 13, who described horrifying working conditions. (His conviction, though, was for financial fraud.)
In its statement, the White House noted that leniency for Rubashkin was “an action encouraged by bipartisan leaders from across the political spectrum,” including Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), then-Democratic leader of the House, and Republican Orrin G. Hatch (Utah), then-president pro tempore of the Senate.
It can be hard for those who do the hiring to discern whether the documents that job applicants provide are valid. Undocumented workers often produce forgeries or papers they borrowed from others. (In 2019, The Post reported that Trump’s own businesses had relied on undocumented labor, an account based on interviews with nearly 50 current and former employees.)
But few employers even avail themselves of the best tool that is available. Of the estimated 6 million employer firms in the country, fewer than 1 in 6 use E-Verify, the government’s free online system through which employers can confirm the eligibility of their employees to work in this country. Congress has refused to make it mandatory.
Aggressive enforcement could also encourage more migrants to simply go underground, meaning they work off the books and don’t pay taxes or receive insurance. That would “drag down wages and working conditions for everyone,” said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute.
Still, as long as immigration policy remains so lopsided — penalizing those who come to the country illegally but rarely those who hire them — it is hard to imagine a solution that actually addresses the forces that have created today’s chaos.
It’s worth noting that business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have long sought more comprehensive immigration overhaul, including opening new paths for foreign workers to legally fill the needs of U.S. employers. The chamber also supports mandatory use of E-Verify.
There is a solution to the problem of illegal immigration, but lawmakers must recognize that it can’t begin and end with border walls and razor wire.
