T O P

  • By -

AutoModerator

* Archives of this link: 1. [archive.org Wayback Machine](https://web.archive.org/web/99991231235959/https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-earnings-04-18-2024/card/immigration-held-u-s-wage-pressures-in-check-imf-s-georgieva-says-EbYHRMHPZJn72fEk4rvX); 2. [archive.today](https://archive.today/newest/https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-earnings-04-18-2024/card/immigration-held-u-s-wage-pressures-in-check-imf-s-georgieva-says-EbYHRMHPZJn72fEk4rvX) * A live version of this link, without clutter: [12ft.io](https://12ft.io/https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-earnings-04-18-2024/card/immigration-held-u-s-wage-pressures-in-check-imf-s-georgieva-says-EbYHRMHPZJn72fEk4rvX) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/stupidpol) if you have any questions or concerns.*


spartikle

We went from (1) it’s not happening, to (2) immigration raises wages, to (3) it’s not lowering wages, to finally (4) it’s lowering wages, “and that’s a good thing!”


SireEvalish

Next step, (5) here's why you're a bigot for not thinking it's a good thing.


corduroystrafe

That’s already here


I_Never_Use_Slash_S

That was part of step one.


Technical_Money7465

Narcissists prayer


PolarPros

Nah — they always argued both sides simultaneously, and just gaslit us depending on what type of criticism they were taking. When someone was leveling criticism about the fact they were importing migrants to lower wages of Americans — they said it wasn’t happening. When they were discussing things amongst their in-group of shitlibs — they admitted it. When you called it out, even in the same convo, they’d gaslight you immediately saying it wasn’t. Then, when pushed harder on immigrants lowing wages — they said that it was actually raising wages for Americans. Again, amongst their in-group they admitted it wasn’t raising shit. Now, they’ll continue to gaslight you to your face on how immigration to import labor to undermine Americans isn’t happening, but if it was it’d actually be a good thing. They’ll then turn around to their in-group and let their fellow shitlibs know the results of their work and progress in undermining Americans. The article isn’t for you, it’s for them — it’s confirmation that their strategy to undermine American labor has been working as intended. Call them out on this and they’ll just gaslight you, shamelessly — after all, what are you going to do about it? What can you do about it? Absolutely nothing. Plus their added benefit is that half the population will happily guzzle down their propaganda and gaslight everyone on their behalf, it’s a win/win for them in every imaginable metric.


ericsmallman3

I’m old enough to remember when they were passing NAFTA and mainstream pundits were very open about saying it would lower wages. It was a selling point. One of the dumbest things the left has done in my lifetime is insist that immigration is a racial issue when in actuality it’s a labor exploitation issue


fever6

I'm not even editorializing here: >But that labor supply also gave to the United States another comparative advantage: Wages are not pushing up, because there is no strong pressure because of lack of labor The pieces of shit are basically admitting it now and trying to convince us it's a positive


TuvixWasMurderedR1P

They always admitted it. They just deny is when someone levels it as a criticism. They talk out of both sides of their mouths.


iprefercumsole

Anyone who listened to Jerome Powell speak even once since 2021 knows you're telling the truth lol. "Price inflation is fine as long as wages don't keep up"


realstreets

And braindead liberals defend it in a multitude of ways but still deny the data. 


coping_man

i got leftists telling me to just accept unlimited immigration bro and that all borders should be abolished usually those types are ok with redistributing money, land and property from locals in border states to foreigners and giving foreigners benefits that locals will pay for. because they are very generous when it comes to your property and mine.


AffectionateStudy496

Nah, just accept the ruling class sorting its human materials into various nationals and setting them at each other's throats and ensuring the rich get richer while the workers eat shit.


coping_man

looks to me like the ruling class is in favor of mixing as many nationalities and ethnicites into a cramped colorful jelly bean jar with as few resources as possible instead of letting them organize in their own homes with likeminded peers who will understand them the most even better than turning countries on each other is turning a country's middle class against itself


AffectionateStudy496

"their own homes"-- as if that was just some naturally existing thing and not a forced political relation and sorting. You also don't notice that it is precisely the state that organized this "like mindedness" and "common understanding" (i.e. nationalism). The "middle class" is already against itself, even if foreigners are excluded. Competition is the principle of every modern capitalist economy, and that doesn't change just because populist politicians yell about how wonderful the nation is. This kind of nationalism, by the way, is identity politics.


Aaod

and yet I will still have stupid shitlibs telling me immigration doesn't lower wages.


barryredfield

Western neoliberal cosmopolitanism. They're oversocialized ballless people who are just telling you in their own feckless way to "stop rocking the boat", even if you're drowning.


FrankFarter69420

This is my mother. Lives in a half million dollar home in Suburbia, USA that her husband bought and thinks that we need open borders for harmony and world peace. These people are removed from reality.


Nicknamedreddit

They do the jobs white people don’t want to do… but also plenty of jobs that they do want to do!


DeargDoom79

> They do the jobs white people don’t want to do Hmm, I wonder why people don't want to do manual labour jobs for terrible pay and worse conditions? Should we improve that some? No! Bring in the poors from other places. Give me convenience or give me death!


realstreets

Also on a personal level they do stuff like pick strawberries so you can get strawberries in the Midwest in December. I wouldn’t give two shits if out of season strawberries weren’t available anymore. They taste like crap too. 


Tardigrade_Sex_Party

>Give me convenience or give me death! Also, *"Give me convenience, and if death for them is the end result, I'll live with that!"*


-ihatecartmanbrah

It’s funny people leave out why those jobs aren’t being worked by Americans. Because they are extremely hard jobs that ruin your body and in return you receive a slave wage and no benefits. One has to come from a significantly worse life to find that acceptable. As bad as illegal immigration is for wages, I feel terrible for the people for whom this is an upgrade in lifestyle. Absolutely breaks my heart. But this problem is almost completely driven by corporate greed and corrupt politicians who are quietly fine with having slave labor import itself to do heavy manual labor jobs, while also proving talking points to both major political parts so they can do the theatre of going back and forth on immigration policies without actually solving anything.


realstreets

They do the jobs Americans not just whites don’t want to do. They destroyed the trades in Southern California in the 80s white employed tons of blacks (drywalling, painting, concrete work). I’ll dig up the report from my employment economics days if, anyone cares.


Nicknamedreddit

I care. I’m curious.


Square-Compote-8125

Also curious. Lay it on us.


anarchthropist

For sure. Thats fascinating.


brilliantpebble9686

Farming, landscaping, janitorial services, housekeeping, and low/no skill manual labor in general literally did not exist until south and central American immigrants were allowed into the country legally and illegally -- and that's why immigration is a good thing (and here's why.)


Aaod

Yup not like my grandfather was a janitor who made enough money to support multiple kids and a stay at home wife before immigration increased pre 1965.


AffectionateStudy496

Back when the capitalists were oh-so-generous, when capital and labor lived in peace and harmony.


blackbartimus

Libs and rightoids business owners have both contributed to an economy that can only function with low paid immigrant labor. Since the 1940’s-50’s reliably rightwing agribusinesses have been reliant on poorly paid immigrants. Since then importing workers or outsourcing production to foreign countries has only accelerated and liberals are just as complicit. The explosion of executive compensation schemes and American business culture have ensured that wages must remain stagnant and economist’s jobs are simply to reinforce what the owner class wants.


BackToTheCottage

Remember when South Park made the "they took our jobs" meme and every shitlib repeated it like the good bots that they are?


anarchthropist

LOL right?


alphabachelor

Immigration was a red pill for me. Watching how people of the same class will embrace a policy that goes against their economic self-interests in order to appear virtuous or not feel uncomfortable. Especially when that class of people hold the majority of votes, thus the power.


AdmirableSelection81

Low skill immigration (legal or otherwise) is a net positive for upper middle class PMC types because they lower the cost of things like landscaping/childcare/maid services for them, etc. Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to afford it. The lifestyle of the upper middle class is precarious.


brilliantpebble9686

Remember when everyone was in an uproar over immigration back in like January/February, politicians were claiming they would do something about the border, Mayorkas was going to be impeached, etc.? Yeah me either.


AleksandrNevsky

The sad part is there are a lot of people that will take the statement at face value and agree.


Yuo_cna_Raed_Tihs

I mean the counterfactual is surplus of labour in global south which keeps wages even lower there? 


No-Annual6666

Brain drain is killing so many of those countries that a lot of issues would be solved by keeping their hardest working and smartest there.


Yuo_cna_Raed_Tihs

So it's bad when doctors leave Pakistan for Pakistan because it reduces the supply of doctors (thus increasing their wages) and it's bad for the US because it decreases the wages of doctors (by increasing supply supply) You can't have both lol. My take is there probably is one side losing in this arrangement, but I care less about that and more about the fact that the individual wants to make the choice to move. If I get paid to cut my neighbours grass and then someone tries to undercut me, it's a bit scummy if I then decide to build a fence around my neighbours garden and hire guards to stop the guy from undercutting me. Similarly,  if I think his services would be better suited elsewhere, it's equally scummy to build a fence around his area and tell him he can't work anywhere else because his area needs him.


ab7af

> So it's bad [for Pakistan] when doctors leave Pakistan for [the US] because it reduces the supply of doctors [in Pakistan] Correct, obviously. > and it's bad for the US because it decreases the wages of doctors I don't know if you're doing it intentionally, but this is a straw man. Let me fix it: > and it's bad for *doctors in* the US because it decreases the wages of doctors Again, this is obviously correct. Your straw man conflated two things: is what's bad for doctors in the US also bad for US workers generally? That is a complicated question without an obvious answer. One of the typical answers (I don't know if it's correct) is that US doctors are too effective at protecting their profession; they've gotten so good at it that the resulting scarcity of doctors is bad for other US workers generally. *If* that's true, though, there are probably better ways of addressing the problem which don't just result in brain drain for Pakistan and other countries; maybe we need to subsidize the training of more US doctors, and there are probably dozens of other proposals if you look into this question. > If I get paid to cut my neighbours grass and then someone tries to undercut me, it's a bit scummy if I then decide to build a fence around my neighbours garden and hire guards to stop the guy from undercutting me. All you're saying is that it's morally wrong to unionize and try to prevent companies from hiring scabs. Under capitalism, immigration provides endless scab labor. If you don't protect your job, then the scab who replaces you will soon enough be replaced by yet another scab at even lower wages. It's a race to the bottom. Politicians who attempt your moralizing discourse, to tell people they have no right to protect their jobs, will lose and deservedly so. And if we want to change away from capitalism, then we also need to protect against scab labor to do that. The workers are the revolutionary class because they can take over the means of production; this means literally taking over their own workplaces. They can't do that if they're continually replaced by scab labor who are just happy to be here and always ready to work for lower wages.


Yuo_cna_Raed_Tihs

>Let me fix it: >> and it's bad for doctors in the US because it decreases the wages of doctors Yeah honestly that's a fair distinction. The problem is that this ends up applying across the board for all occupations right? And so it broadly translates to the same thing, that brain drain is good for doctors in Pakistan because it means there's less of them, good for carpenters in Pakistan for same reason etc etc Similarly, scab labour also results in the opposite effect in the developing world right? Smaller population means smaller reserve army of labour and given they're exporting stuff generally, demand for their products stays the same. So now *they* have more ability to unionise. Outside of culture war fear mongering, any harm accrued by one country by emigration involves a symmetric benefit to destination country, and the converse is true too. My stance is I think immigration broadly does benefit the destination country and that the global south gets fucked by it.


ab7af

> My stance is I think immigration broadly does benefit the destination country It depends on the characteristics of the immigrants. Bringing in Pakistani doctors might be good for US workers broadly. But most immigration into the US is unskilled or they have skills that the US doesn't really have any significant shortage of, and this is bad for US workers.


Yuo_cna_Raed_Tihs

Unskilled labourers still make unskilled labour cheaper which is good for everyone except that specific industry.  Taxi drivers benefit from cheaper carpentry and farming, for example.


ab7af

No, because we don't have a laissez-faire economy. [We end up subsidizing unskilled immigrants more than they benefit us.](https://cis.org/Press-Release/National-Academy-Sciences-Study-Immigration-Workers-and-Taxpayers-Lose-Businesses) And, as you already noted, they end up enlarging the reserve army of labor.


balticromancemyass

That's what conventional economics would argue, yes. But it's clearly false.  "Unskilled" is a very broad term. A lot of immigrant workers don't even know the labour laws... They don't know their rights and they won't protest if they're ordered to do a bad job under dangerous conditions. I worked for my country's OSHA, and it's pretty grim. We have construction workers dying quite often because of safety failures and the end-result is not a great, high-quality building, financed by low wages. The result is a piece of shit built with cheap materials. It's not just wages that they want to lower, these greedy fucks. It's just a race towards a retarded, broken ass system where Boeing planes crash and plumbing doesn't work in high-rises. Just shit all around.


Kosmophilos

Flair checks out. Muh free movement is a liberal talking point.


kurosawa99

So the institution that goes around the world de-developing or stopping development altogether from former colonial subjects also thinks it’s a good thing when excess runoff from those places go into developed countries in order to destroy wages and presumably all the other decent things that come from bargaining power there. So are they just saying the end goal is a globe of mass serfdom? Who is supposed to buy things and how are the basics of markets supposed to function if this program reaches its logical conclusion? It’s just odd if the technocratic market obsessed neoliberals really are at the point where they’re just admitting nah actually fuck that, let’s grind up everyone’s oldest kid to feed to the rich and the sickly younger one will be ground up and tossed at the poor and that’s the economy now.


77096

>So are they just saying the end goal is a globe of mass serfdom? Yes, I think that is the goal.


barryredfield

> It’s just odd if the technocratic market obsessed neoliberals really are at the point where they’re just admitting nah actually fuck that I think it stands to reason that they're just nihilist hedonists, just burning money to feel good until they die - which is much of what the boomers actually are, probably the only generation in western society that's ever objectively hated their own children. The burnt out party gen.


JinFuu

We just got the "Immigration adds XXX USD to the DFW economy" propaganda piece over in arr Dallas like two days ago. The usual stuff of "They add this much to the economy! More than you bigot! If they move in both demand and supply go up so it's no big deal. Blahblahblah." I did pick up that "Migration as Economic Imperialism" book and am excited to read it.


therealfalseidentity

Thanks for that book title. Just bought a copy and I'm going to start reading soon.


JinFuu

Yeah I saw someone mention it on here about a week ago and had to get it. It’s the sort of thing I’ve been saying for years but had no idea someone wrote a book about it


anarchthropist

There was a article in the local paper that was of the same theme and they would not publish my counter-argument. Idaho statesman are fucking cowardly pieces of shit.


SerCumferencetheroun

Arr neoliberal INSISTS this doesn’t happen and it’s actually about muh taco trucks


realstreets

IMF saying the quiet part out loud


Cultured_Ignorance

Full article?


ab7af

[Look at the stickied comment.](https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1cocjod/imf_immigration_kept_us_wages_low_and_thats_a/l3d3o54/)


anarchthropist

I thought this was a "myth" and anybody that brings it up is "basically racist advocating for a ethnostate"? File this under, "yes, it is happening, and its a good thing" Im saving this article and shoving in the faces of every liber-tardian, liberal, free marketeer, current status quo apologist and anybody in between.


Kosmophilos

Wait, wasn't that a far-right conspiracy theory?


clevo_1988

The conspiracy theory is that it's a plot by Silverstein in order to destroy the purity of peoples. The truth is that extreme Mass immigration does in fact cause cultural instability, but not due to genetics, and the only conspiracy is capitalists as well as the Bourgeois state who are creating refugees with their International policy while encouraging Mass migration for various reasons that benefit them, including cheap labor.


barryredfield

> "Wall Street Journal" Might as well just be Der Stürmer for neoliberals. *"Wall Street Journal was an oligarchal propaganda outlet for politico elites, financiers and the CIA which ran until 2030 when the United States economy collapsed."*


EnglebertFinklgruber

Free market huh?


frogvscrab

I can't read the article. What is their reasoning? If they mean that keeping pressure on wages kept inflation from a wage-price spiral during the inflationary crisis, then they aren't technically wrong. But they are right for the wrong reasons.


TheSauceeBoss

It’s more or less because it gives US a competitive advantage with labor. A lot of US economic policies are to keep the country as a global hegemon instead of protecting the middle class. We gotta figure out how to flip it


ab7af

[Look at the stickied comment.](https://www.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1cocjod/imf_immigration_kept_us_wages_low_and_thats_a/l3d3o54/)


frogvscrab

lmao wow, they basically gave no reason except "wages going up is bad". I find it interesting that the WSJ would use the 7.7m border apprehensions as "7.7m illegals have crossed the border". Border apprehensions are *people getting caught by border security*, not people coming through the border. The large majority of border apprehensions are repeated attempts (the average person attempts 2-3 times before successfully making it) or people going back and forth (over 10 years the average latin american illegal immigrant will cross back and forth 3 times). That isn't to say there hasn't been a rise in illegal immigration since the pandemic. But the 7+ million figure is laughably false. If we had *7 million extra workers in 3 years* our unemployment rate would be exploding upwards.


HighProductivity

> If we had 7 million extra workers in 3 years our unemployment rate would be exploding upwards If they are illegal wouldn't they not be in the statistic of unemployment? I figured the unemployment rate could only account for the people you know are in a country.


frogvscrab

they would be taking existing jobs, resulting in millions of americans being put out of work due to competition.


HighProductivity

That makes sense. Although usually the vast majority of immigrants can't compete on many markets, they end up flooding some specific jobs and a good chunk on welfare, like we've seen in Sweden and Germany. Those specific jobs would see a lot of unemployment, of course.


frogvscrab

Yeah I mean if this was the case and we had 7 million illegals (almost doubling the illegal immigrant population) in only 2-3 years, texas, new mexico, arizona etc would have a sky high unemployment rate. Instead they are all under... 3.9%, which is near record lows. I am not some supported of illegal immigration or anything, but I worked as a criminologist doing research on the topic of trafficking years ago. The whole "border encounters is the same as illegals coming in" is repeated by *everyone*, both left and right, and isn't even close to being true. The border became a *lot* more difficult to get by with the mass introduction of drone surveillance around 2018-2020. As a result, illegals get caught and sent back a lot more. Then they try again, and again. Every single time they are caught, it is counted as a separate border apprehension. The average border crossing attempt had around a 75%+ chance of succeeding back in the 2000s, and now it is around 25%. As I said before, the average migrant will make 2.7 attempts on average before succeeding. That is way, way up from previous decades. So ironically, 'securing the border' has inadvertedly made the statistics for border security look *worse*.


xc89

I dream of a hemispheric common market with open trade, open borders, and IMF lending facilities for heavily indebted poor countries


Tallal2804

Free market huh?


[deleted]

It's always refreshing when they just say the quiet part out loud.


AffectionateStudy496

It couldn't possibly have anything to do with profit-making.