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| 4/3 |
| 2006/9/22-25 [Politics/Domestic/Immigration] UID:44504 Activity:kinda low |
9/22 It turns out if illegals didn't pick our produce, the price wouldn't
change much. (Seattle Times)
http://csua.org/u/gz3
\_ Price has nothing to do with it. It is unethical and immortal to
pay people what illegals get paid.
\_ My interpretation of the data is that the difference in cost is
17 cents, but builder profit is 12 cents.
17% more expensive is pretty huge, much more than "a few thousand"
dollars.
\_ No kidding. Do you think Mexicans are picking the produce in
France, too? California has a lot of illegals willing to do
construction and we actually pay more for that sort of work
than most other states. Having a Mexican maid at the Four
Seasons didn't exactly slash my hotel bill either.
\_ No, Africans do, as in Spain. Germany and the UK? Eastern
Europeans. -John
\_ As long as there is work in America and no work in Mexico and
Central America, I'll make sure people keep on coming. The border
is thousands of miles long, and there will always be holes no matter
how much money you throw at the problem. c.f. The War on Drugs.
--the invisible hand
\_ Start slapping employers with fines and jail time and there
won't be any jobs for illegals. --the visible hand
\_ Agreed. -invisible conservative
\- and there will be fewer illegal criminal employers too!
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/aliens.html
\_ Again, c.f. The War On Drugs. Face it, globalization is
stronger than you. So is THE INVISIBLE HAND, BITCHES!
--the invisible hand
\_ agreed - ultra-left liberal. I am SOOOOOOO pissed at
the current immigration debate. I view this as a form of
corporate welfare which we need to get rid of. I don't
understand why some of my liberal collegues demands
"rights" for these illegal immigrants. demanding illegal
immigrant's right is almost like my self demanding the
quality of coke/crack to be monitored and regulated by FDA.
\- i found it amazing to talk to some black union people
who never gave a second thought to making "arguments"
like "are you relly comfortable letting somebody
if *india8 or *pakistan* do you tax returns!", as
if *india* or *pakistan* do you tax returns!", as
if it was self-evident that "those people" were all
crooked, stereotyping 3rd world workers as being
potential identity thieves. [i believe they were
focusing on the trust rather than the competence
issue, although they werent exactly granting that
these workers had reasonable price-productivity].
\_ Agreed, a lot of people have uninformed issues with
trust of workers in developing economies for racial
or cultural reasons, but they make the right point for
the wrong reason. First, I do not trust India or
Pakistan (your examples, but many others apply) to
have significant data protection laws in place. I
also do not have the same legal recourse in case of
abuse that I have in my own country--viz. the UCSF
case of the poor chick in Pakistan (?) threatening to
release thousands of patient records she was processing
because some scumbag (US) subcontractor had not paid
her. Lastly, although this does not apply so much to
individual services like tax returns as much as to
corporate project work, I have _serious_ competence and
reliability issues, as every single one of a large
number of high-value IT projects I've either worked on
or near that relied on organized outsourcing to Wipro,
Infosys, or any of a number of other Indian firms, has
involved overselling, cost overruns, gross inefficiency,
involved overselling, cost overruns, inefficiency,
delays and sundry other fuckups. I refuse to imply
conclusions like "Indian workers are useless", as all
people I've seen actually _brought on site_ had about
the same usefulness level as "Western" workers, but for
offshore work, I'll pass. -John
\- i was kinda worndering if i should have
anticipated exactly the two arguments you made
[except i had not heard about the ucsf case] but
i was felling lazy. first, yeah, i agree there is
something to be said about the data protection
argument. a lot of business relationship work
because the possibility of litigation solves the
"prisoner's dilemma" problem. but these guys were
"arguing by stereotype". it was the same argument
as "well you really cant trust a 23 yr old black
man looking for a taxi ... he might be a nice guy
but he also might be a ghetto thug". i think we
are in agreement here. as for the lower end of the
IT work curve, i think outsourcing has exposed
talented people here to untalented people there.
i think this sort of happened here with the
<DEAD>dot.com<DEAD> boom when all kinds of non-science/eng
morons flowed into the high tech field and you
had vast numbers of dba or "web programmers"
who had no clue what they were doing. many of
these former english majors have exited the mkt here
but these people are still flocking into the mkt
there. moving from teh people-talent to project
fuckups: i dont remember the numbers, but "studies
show" some giant percentage of IT projects fail,
so the failure baserate may be pretty high.
and these flavor of fuckups are not uncommon here.
from halliburton, to defense contracting, to DHS
IT projects, BIGDIG, Bay Bridge [yes, the govt is
the other party in all of those cases, but private
companies dont advertise their fuckups now, do they].
Oh actually, i just remember a whole raft of fuckups
with a friend who outsourced a bunch of IT things to
KPMG. This was a case where they were a small client
so they got the KPMG dumbasses ... who turned out
to also have a bad work ethic and were essentially
dishonest [walked out of debugging a problem at 5pm
when my friend left for a minute, expensed basketball
tix to the contract etc. pretty much everything
with those guys failed, except for some trivial
stuff they could have just done themselves. again,
where you sit influneces who you deal with. "govt
workers @lbl.gov != govt workers at the port of
oakland]
\_ I did say "right point for the wrong reason."
I think we agree there. And yes, many IT
projects fail--in my case, I'm batting about
90% so far, and those 10% were because of
lack of customer senior mgmt buy-in after we
finished (I never work with or for idiots or
losers, thank god.) However, the mediocre
quality of all offshoring work I've seen
(management, technical skills, worker
initiative and motivation) always added yet
another major failure factor to projects it
caused to tank, which would not have been
there otherwise that's all. Oh and btw,
the three reasons I named against offshoring
work apply to India, Pakistan, China,
Russia, Malaysia and a number of other
second-tier economies in my experience. -John |
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| csua.org/u/gz3 -> seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003265139_imprices19.html Part 2 | Get-tough policy on employers has had limited effect More than 7 million illegal immigrants work in the United States. They build houses, pick crops, slaughter cattle, stitch clothes, mow lawns, clean hotel rooms, cook restaurant meals and wash the dishes that come back. You might assume that the plentiful supply of low-wage illegal workers would translate into significantly lower prices for the goods and services they produce. In fact, their impact on consumer prices -- call it the "illegal-worker discount" -- is surprisingly small. The bag of Washington state apples you bought last weekend? Probably a few cents cheaper than it otherwise would have been, economists estimate. Hard to say, but perhaps a few thousand dollars less expensive. The underlying reason, economists say, is that for most goods the labor -- whether legal or illegal, native- or foreign-born -- represents only a sliver of the retail price. Consider those apples -- Washington's signature contribution to the American food basket. At a local QFC, Red Delicious apples go for about 99 cents a pound. Of that, only about 7 cents represents the cost of labor, said Tom Schotzko, a recently retired extension economist at Washington State University. The rest represents the grower's other expenses, warehousing and shipping fees, and the retailer's markup. And that's for one of the most labor-intensive crops in the state: It takes 150 to 190 hours of labor to grow and harvest an acre of apples, Schotzko said, compared to four hours for an acre of potatoes and 1 hours for an acre of wheat. The labor-intensive nature of many crops is a key reason agriculture continues to rely on illegal workers. A report by Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center who has long studied immigration trends, estimates that 247,000 illegal immigrants were employed as "miscellaneous agricultural workers" last year -- only 34 percent of the nation's 72 million illegal workers, according to Pew statistics, but 29 percent of all workers in that job category. Eliminating illegal farmworkers, by shrinking the pool of available labor, likely would raise wages for those who remain. Philip Martin, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of California, Davis, noted that two years after the old bracero program ended in 1964, the United Farm Workers union won a 40 percent increase for grape harvesters. A decade ago, two Iowa State University agricultural economists estimated that removing all illegal farmworkers would raise wages for seasonal farmworkers by 30 percent in the first couple of years, and 15 percent in the medium term. advertising But supermarket prices of summer-fall fruits and vegetables, they concluded, would rise by just 6 percent in the short run -- dropping to 3 percent over time, as imports took up some of the slack and some farmers mechanized their operations or shifted out of labor-intensive crops. Cluster in construction Illegal immigrants, like legal ones, tend to concentrate in particular locales and industries, increasing their impact on wages and prices there. Pew's Passell estimates that more than two-thirds of all illegal immigrants live in just eight states: California leads with nearly a quarter of all illegal immigrants, followed by Texas, Florida, New York, Arizona, Illinois, New Jersey and North Carolina. Similarly, legal and illegal immigrants tend to cluster in specific industries, among them construction. Based on census data, Passell estimates that in construction specialties, illegal immigrants range from 20 percent of carpet, floor and tile installers to 28 percent of drywallers to 36 percent of insulation workers. Overall, about 14 percent of all workers in the construction industry are in the United States illegally, he says. How does all that illegal labor affect the price you pay for a new house? The National Association of Home Builders pegs labor's share of the cost of a new home at 20 to 25 percent. For a typical US single-family home that sold for $298,412 in 2002, then, about $68,000 went for construction labor. If Passell's estimates are correct, around 14 percent of those workers would be illegal. But illegal workers generally are less skilled than legal ones, points out Barry Chiswick, an economist at the University of Illinois, Chicago, who has studied illegal immigration for decades. You're more likely to find illegal drywallers or painters, say, than illegal electricians or plumbers. Since higher-skilled workers earn more than less-skilled ones, Chiswick said, the "illegal share" of construction labor costs -- and, by extension, the wages illegal workers receive -- will be smaller than their numbers would suggest. But even if illegal workers make only half as much as legal workers, that would work out to about $5,000, or about 16 percent of that "typical" home's sale price. If the supply of illegal workers were cut off, wages for those low-skilled jobs presumably would have to rise enough to attract legal workers into them. If, hypothetically, wage levels rose by a third, that would either add around $1,600 to the cost of the typical house or shave half a percentage point off the builder's 12 percent average profit margin. "If I'm buying just one home, there's not that big an impact," Chiswick said. "But if I'm building a lot of homes and I can save a few thousand on each one.... " Even in service-intensive businesses with high incidences of illegal labor, such as hotels and restaurants, customers get only a small benefit. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study estimated that every 10-percent increase in the proportion of low-skilled immigrants in the labor force lowers the price of immigrant-intensive services -- gardening, housekeeping, baby-sitting and dry cleaning -- by 13 percent, and of other services by 02 percent. Industrywide, more than 44 percent of hotels' expenses are for salaries and benefits (including employee meals), so labor is a major factor. "We've got a lot of jobs that are tough to fill," said Dan Mount, who teaches hotel management at Penn State. "To find someone who's going to clean 16 guestrooms a day for $6 or $7 an hour -- people aren't lining up for those jobs." According to Pew's Passell, 22 percent of maids and housekeepers (including domestic help) are in the United States illegally. Similarly, in restaurants an estimated 20 percent of cooks and 23 percent of dishwashers are illegal immigrants. Jim Harbour, a former restaurant manager who now teaches at Washington State University's School of Hospitality Business Management, estimated that, without illegal immigrants, wages for dishwashers and other "back of the house" staff would have to rise anywhere from 10 to 20 percent to attract the necessary workers. With labor costs averaging around 30 percent of operating costs, passing on that kind of increase might raise the cost of a meal anywhere from 3 to 6 percent. Under a similar scenario, Mount said, hotel-room rates would rise, but the increase likely would be measured in dollars rather than tens of dollars. How much could be passed on to the consumer is another question. On the one hand, Harbour said he's raised menu prices by 10 percent across the board with few customer complaints; and hotels in the Seattle area are fuller now than they were a year ago despite higher room rates. On the other hand, hotel and restaurant operators' ability to pass on higher wage costs isn't unlimited, said Terry Umbreit, director of the WSU hospitality school. At a certain point, he said, people won't pay any more for a room or a meal; budget hotels and casual-dining restaurants, which compete most on price, likely would reach that point soonest. Benefits top layers Of course, the "illegal-immigrant discount" affects different layers of society differently. The more often you eat out, stay in hotels or get your yard trimmed, the more you benefit from the illegal-immigrant discount. And by increasing the supply of low-skilled labor relative to high-skilled labor, illegal immigration effectively boosts the purchasing power of the better-educated, more-skilled -- and richer -- portion of socie... |
| www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/aliens.html Aliens Geoffrey Nunberg "Fresh Air" commentary, April 11, 2006 Back in 1920, The New Republic reported on an exercise in which the students at a New England college were asked to provide definitions of the word alien. Their answers were uniformly negative: "a person who is hostile to this country," "a person on the opposite side," "an enemy from a foreign land." Commenting on those responses three years later in his book Public Opinion, Walter Lippman remarked on how odd it was that emotional meanings should attach to what was in fact an exact legal term. But by then, the word alien had been colored by decades of anti-immigrant sentiment, which reached its peak in the red scares of the years after World War I "Fully 90 percent of communist and anarchist agitation is traceable to aliens," said the Attorney General and presidential hopeful A Mitchell Palmer in 1920, by way of justifying the raids that rounded up and deported 10,000 suspected radicals whom he described as "aliens... of misshapen caste of mind and indecencies of character." That's a chronic feature of the language of immigration. The words refuse to be confined to their legal and economic senses; they swell with emotional meanings that reflect the fears and passions of the time. True, alien no longer conjures up images of wild-eyed, bomb-throwing anarchists. Not even the fiercest opponents of immigration reform claim that the Mexicans, Chinese, and Irish who enter the country illegally are seeking anything but economic opportunity. But alien still suggests strangeness and difference -- people who are "not of our sort." That's partly due to the science-fiction writers who picked the word up in the 1930's to refer to extraterrestrial beings. It's revealing that alien is far more likely to be used to describe Mexicans and Central Americans than Europeans. The tens of thousands of Irish and Poles who are in the country illegally are almost always referred to as "immigrants," not "aliens." And anti-immigrationists almost never use aliens to describe foreigners who are in the country legally -- on news broadcasts, "illegal aliens" outnumbers "legal aliens" by about 100 to 1 Whatever its legal meaning, when it comes to the crunch, alien means "brown people who snuck in." Nowadays, those connotations have led the majority of the mainstream media to steer clear of the word aliens -- "illegal immigrants" tends to be the phrase of choice. But illegal has something more than a technical meaning, too. True, dictionaries define the word simply as "not according to law." But there are disparaging connotations to the negative prefix in illegal, which is actually just a variant of the prefix in-. Inhuman doesn't mean the same thing as "not human," and you don't become irreligious simply by not going to church. And you hear the same negative tone in words like insincere, inflexible, and illegitimate. So it isn't surprising that we reserve illegal for conveying strong disapproval. We may talk about illegal drugs, but we don't describe the Porsche 959 as an illegal car, even though it can't legally be driven in the US. Then too, we don't usually describe law-breakers as being illegal in themselves. Jack Abramoff may have done illegal lobbying, but nobody has called him an illegal lobbyist. And whatever laws Bernie Ebbers and Martha Stewart may have broken, they weren't illegal CEO's. It's only your immigration status that can qualify you as being an illegal person, or that can earn you the honor of being "an illegal" all by itself. That use of illegal as a noun actually goes back a long ways. The British coined it in the 1930's to describe Jews who entered Palestine without official permission, and it has been used ever since as a way of reducing individuals to their infractions. Out of desperation, people turn to borrowing words from other languages, but that can have its pitfalls, too. "Guest worker" sounds a lot more precious than the German word Gastarbeiter it was based on -- in German, after all, Gast can mean simply visitor. That word was introduced in the 1970's as a version of the French phrase sans papiers, or "without papers," which is used in a number of other nations to refer to immigrants who have no legal status -- at the rallies across the country in recent days, Spanish speakers were using the equivalent sin papeles. Undocumented may be the most decent word that's available to us, but something was lost in that translation, too. It isn't just that undocumented adds a bureaucratic note, but that it focuses on the government's records rather than the immigrants themselves. Visitors who overstay their visas may not be undocumented in the strict sense of the term, which is why the INS ultimately decided to stay with "illegal." But those people are still without papers in the more suggestive European sense, people who have to live without any official status in the shadow of a modern state. Aliens, illegals, even undocumented -- over the past hundred years, it has been in the nature of the language of immigration to suppress the human side of the story. As the Swiss writer Max Frisch wrote in 1965 about the European experience with immigration, "We called for a labor force, but it was human beings that came." earliest recorded use of the noun alien in science fiction is from a short story by P Barashovsky called "One Prehistoric Night," published in Wonder Stories in 1934. |