Basically the Republican party (specifically, the House GOP caucus led by Newt Gingrich) created the current system in 1996 with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), because the right wing of their base was mad about the immigration amnesty that took place during the Reagan administration (a compromise with Congress). They've refused to countenance any sort of compromise since then, insisting on a total border shutdown.
The Democratic party is nominally opposed to this, but its reform proposals have been limited to tinkering around the edges (eg DACA) because when you get down to it, they're terrified of the far right and less aggressive about pursuing their legislative goals. They like to say they're for comprehensive immigration reform, but I'm not aware of any bills they've introduced that spell out specific policies, again because they're terrified of being attacked by the far right.
I think you are oversimplifying what is a complex multivariate problem. Ascribing culpability to one or the other party, in my opinion, doesn't quite get it.
Americans, if I am to generalize, are pretty ignorant of the world. As an immigrant this much is brutally evident. Even though I have now lived in the US for most of my life, I can't say that I truly get how Americans (born, not naturalized) think of immigration.
Anywhere else in the world --anywhere-- immigration laws are clear as well as strict. This makes sense. You have to have beneficial metrics to the influx. What does this mean? Well, if you are not creating any new jobs that match the skill set of those coming in, you are importing a problem. On the other hand, it is perfectly sensible to be selective and develop entry requirements that align well with internal needs. In lots of countries they have point systems to qualify individuals and families for immigration.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with not being sensitive to the plight of the less fortunate in various parts of the world. It is a simple fact that you cannot take in millions of people without serious consequences if you are not ready for that influx.
For some incomprehensible reason the US has, over the last few years, let in over six million people without much in the way of controls. This, by definition, means, at a minimum, six million unemployed. We are not creating an extra 100K+ jobs per month. This is particularly true of the kinds of jobs these people are likely to qualify for.
What does that mean? Well, at a minimum, any job they land will be taken from someone else. This is what's called a "displacement market"; when you have limited resources, a resource unit taken is a resource unit not available to someone else. This isn't hard to understand.
The other, decidedly ugly, problem, is that millions of people will be exploited in jobs where they will be paid below legal levels. If they are lucky the exploitation ends there.
Sometimes I get the sense that Americans (born, not naturalized) without world and multicultural experience have this idealized sense of immigration through uncontrolled means.
First of all, most people crossing the border illegally are not refugees. Not to go too far, I'm in Mexico as I type this. Wonderful country, despite what US news sources sometimes portray. We are staying at a pretty high end resort. Not cheap. We met this Mexican family who are also staying here. They live in the US. The entire reason for them living in the US is to build a pretty nice house here in Mexico and then move back. I was talking to another guy who was saving money to buy a fleet of trucks and move back to Mexico to start and run a transportation company.
Last week, I was talking to a guy who is going to paint our house. Coincidentally, he is also Mexican. Same thing, he said he flies to Mexico two or three times a year to look after the construction of three homes. One is for him and his family to move into and the other two for rental income.
You can live well in Mexico with $1000 USD per month. The $15/hr minimum wage in the US is a goldmine in this context. Get a bunch of people to share living quarters for a few years and you can save-up (or send) enough money to Mexico to live well.
I am not implying that everyone coming to the US operates this way. That would not be accurate. However, you would be surprised how much of an ATM machine the US is for the world.
Sometimes taking things to ridiculous limits helps understand issues more clearly. We understand zero immigration isn't a good idea. I believe the annual US legal immigration quota is in the order of 1.5 million. Not bad. I would want to understand how people are qualified. I think we need a points system and a process of acceptance that is in sync with our needs. You allocate an additional quota for people who might not qualify through this program. That's fine.
Pushing the limits, if we let in 50 million people --they would absolutely come if we had even less controls-- it would be mayhem. The US has lost most of its industrial base to China. This means we don't really create jobs. Our industrial/manufacturing base isn't expanding at a sufficient rate to justify such influx.
Plainly speaking: Immigration has to be goals-based, limited and controlled. What we have today isn't ANY of those. This isn't good for the US. I have the ugly feeling most Americans don't understand this.
Any two paragraph comment is necessarily an over-simplification, and I'm mindful of the fact that this conversation is basically about a photographer who documented child labor practices rather than immigration, which is part of why I kept it brief. However, you make some points that deserve a response. For context, I'm also an immigrant and unusually conversant with the legal and political history, as I intended to become an immigration lawyer at one point.
For some incomprehensible reason the US has, over the last few years, let in over six million people without much in the way of controls. This, by definition, means, at a minimum, six million unemployed. We are not creating an extra 100K+ jobs per month.
We create 3-4 times that many jobs, and part of the reason that some states have been loosening child labor regulations is because employers are having a hard time finding people to staff blue collar jobs.
https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/ces0000000001?output_view=ne...
at a minimum, any job they land will be taken from someone else.
This is called a 'lump of labor fallacy' by economists. It overlooks the fact that job holders also create additional demand = both personally, as individual consumers who need food, shelter, transport and other necessities (plus some discretionary consumption), as productive workers whose output creates wealth for their employer, which wealth is either reinvested or spent on discretionary consumption, and thirdly as workers whose labor has to be paired with other economic inputs like fuel or tools. Particularly in the agricultural sector, if the labor force isn't available the employer often faces the choice of abandoning a project (eg harvesting crops) crop or not investing to produce it in the first place (eg not planting at the beginning of the season).
However, you would be surprised how much of an ATM machine the US is for the world.
This metaphor implies receiving money without any real effort. Certainly immigrants can make far more money in the US than they would in less developed economies for the same combination of skill and labor. In this sense immigrants are engaging in economic arbitrage, ie supplying demand in one market rather than another. This is normal, and indeed the financial sector handsomely rewards people for doing the exact same thing. If capital can move freely across borders to meet demand, why not labor?
I think we need a points system and a process of acceptance that is in sync with our needs.
This will just make the current dysfunctional system more dysfunctional by adding another thick layer of bureaucracy, political gamesmanship, and potential for fraud or abuse.
The US has lost most of its industrial base to China. This means we don't really create jobs. Our industrial/manufacturing base isn't expanding at a sufficient rate to justify such influx.
Perhaps the US should have instituted capital controls several decades ago instead of letting the monied class fatten itself on the short-term windfalls of outsourcing to markets with an oversupply of cheap labor. But to do so would have been to question market orthodoxy and by extension, the whole notion of capitalism as an organizing principle for a civilization - political heresy in America, not withstanding the absence of any particular economic ideology from its founding documents. Again, it's unclear to me why capital should be allowed to move freely in search of maximum return but labor markets should be subjected to arbitrary controls. There is no coherent economic argument in favor of this unless to include autarkical systems like Juche.
US manufacturing is actually doing great and outpacing the rest of the world, in part because China shut its economic engine down to such a degree during COVID. This trend looks likely to continue for some time given the large subsidies still coming down the pipe for green energy and chip production, both of which the US is trying to re-domesticate to lessen its strategic dependence on China and other low-cost labor markets.
I am in the process of designing and planning a new factory. It will likely be located in TX or AZ, because CA is just bat-shit-crazy.
Sounds great, until I explain that our objective is to have this be as automated as possible. Production capacity will be up to 100K units per month (sorry, I can't talk about what we will manufacture). The production line --and the products-- will be designed for nearly 100% automation. Assemblies and components that cannot meet the automation requirements will be outsourced, manufactured abroad and brought-in in automation-ready form. As a result, if everything works out, this will be a lights-out manufacturing line employing just enough engineers and technicians to make it go.
This isn't about greed at all. It simply is impossible to support certain types of jobs in the US when the wage structure is distorted as it is through government interference. Your choices are binary: Automate or outsource. In reality, you, more often than not, have to do both.
Why? Because that's the only way to run manufacturing in the US today. I don't include high-margin aerospace-anything in my definition of manufacturing. When we do aerospace work the financial rules of the game are very different. What's interesting is that neither approach is going to create jobs for dozens of millions of people.
You comment proves my point. You don't understand job creation, immigration, manufacturing, international markets and more.
> We create 3-4 times that many jobs
You are confusing job recovery with job creation. In an economy that was devastated by the pandemic, politicians (and statistics) love to show job creation, when, in reality, it's job recovery.
Job creation is easy to define: First get to the point where no person who is able to work has a job. Any job openings beyond that point represent new jobs created for which there might not be people to fill them.
> job holders also create additional demand
I love economists. They know so much about money and economics that every single millionaire and billionaire is has a degree in Economics. It's amazing, really.
Look my friend, if you are going to grab onto wonderful-sounding theories pushed by economists, you might just have to learn the hard way just how stupid these people and their theories can be.
In my world, the instant someone starts quoting economists is the moment they lose a lot of points with me. Just a personal view. I have almost no respect for them. Pick a country, almost any country, and I'll show you economists who have mucked-up the machinery beyond recognition. Almost every country in Latin America has a "favorite" economist people can name as the root of all evil. Sometimes more than one.
>> you would be surprised how much of an ATM machine the US is for the world.
> This metaphor implies receiving money without any real effort.
That isn't what I said at all. I stated a fact. Personal money transfers amount to well over $150 billion per year. Mexico alone receives some $60 billion of that. China, about $20 billion. Etc. These are not trivial amounts of money.
This is money doing noting in the US economy and lots elsewhere. The US isn't in good shape. Things are not good. $150 billion dollars is a tremendous amount of money to have exit the economy. That's one hell of an ATM machine for those countries. And, yes, from the perspective of the recipients, it is an ATM machine.
> Perhaps the US should have instituted capital controls several decades ago instead of letting the monied class fatten itself on the short-term windfalls of outsourcing to markets with an oversupply of cheap labor.
That statement (the the bit that follows) betrays an almost complete understanding of what happened and how business actually works. Our politicians have failed us for probably fifty years when it comes to foreign economic policy. That much is evident from the results delivered not just to the US, to the world. This has nothing to do with the popular American academic's ideological hatred of capitalism, which is utterly laughable to the core.
> US manufacturing is actually doing great and outpacing the rest of the world
Sorry my friend, you are as wrong as can be. I have been in manufacturing --across a range of domains, from commercial and industrial to aerospace-- for about 40 years. The fact that we have people in this country believing that manufacturing is "doing great" is sad to watch. it would be funny if it was not tragic.
This is one of the main reasons for which I say we are not creating enough jobs to be importing millions of unemployed. Because, well, we are not.
Sometimes it helps to go through some basic numbers, imperfect assumptions as they might be, just to get a sense of proportion. Assume you bring in 6 million people to work in manufacturing. For simple numbers, let's assume a factory can take 6K workers. That means you need a THOUSAND new factories of that scale to support those workers. You show me where we have built anywhere close to a THOUSAND new factories --of that scale-- and I'll change my mind. Filling-in jobs lost at existing factories isn't new job creation.
> This trend looks likely to continue for some time given the large subsidies still coming down the pipe for green energy and chip production
Yeah, good luck. Keep an eye on that. I sincerely hope you figure it out one day. It might take time.
Do me a favor. Drop the immigration lawyer goal. We don't need more lawyers, we need more entrepreneurs willing to risk life, limb and treasure to create things people need and, as a result, yes, create jobs and make everyone's lives better. Lawyers don't create shit. They are parasites feeding on society. If you really want to understand how reality works, go create something. You won't find the answer in books. And, yes, get as far away from economists as you can as fast as you can.
Basically the Republican party (specifically, the House GOP caucus led by Newt Gingrich) created the current system in 1996 with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), because the right wing of their base was mad about the immigration amnesty that took place during the Reagan administration (a compromise with Congress). They've refused to countenance any sort of compromise since then, insisting on a total border shutdown.
The Democratic party is nominally opposed to this, but its reform proposals have been limited to tinkering around the edges (eg DACA) because when you get down to it, they're terrified of the far right and less aggressive about pursuing their legislative goals. They like to say they're for comprehensive immigration reform, but I'm not aware of any bills they've introduced that spell out specific policies, again because they're terrified of being attacked by the far right.