Talking Economics – Immigration

By K. Russell Carlsson, Rogue Economist

Brace yourself, readers – I’ve got a load to drop on you over this one. Everybody from the Dollar Draft Night Rambos at my hangout to my pixie-peckered rodent of an agent has been grinding my grain to address this topic for the last couple months, and I’ve finally had enough. With any luck, this column will be my first and last word on the topic of immigration – the weather finally turned nice and I’d love to lose these laptop-induced tan lines on my thighs.

“But Keith,” you may inquire, “isn’t immigration more of a political / cultural / security issue than an economic one?”

Short answer: No!
Less short answer: No, numbnuts!
Long answer: Immigration is at its very root an economic issue, since the overwhelming majority of people who cross our borders do so to find work. Immigrants affect the available labor pool, which in turn affects the cost of labor, which then affects the cost of goods - the fundamental engine of a free-market economy.

Herein, I look to address the three queries most frequently posed unto me about immigration. I will paraphrase in order to minimize the racial epithets liberally tossed about in the actual questions:

Are immigrants taking our jobs?
How can immigration possibly help?
Why do we have to cater to immigrants?

Are immigrants taking our jobs?

There are two entirely different veins of immigration relating to jobs: legal immigration through the H1B Visa program for higher-skilled foreign workers and illegal immigration for manual labor.

The Federal Government determines the number of H1B Visas they issue by asking industry and business leaders how many artisans in their particular fields (most often science, medicine and technology) they can’t get from within the US labor force. Therefore, in theory, no American jobs are lost through H1B Visas since there are no available Americans qualified to fulfill the positions. Whether industry artificially inflates their needs numbers in order to pay someone from India or China half as much as an American worker should expect to get in a similar position is another question altogether – ramifications of the nation being run by lying shitsacks is out of my purview as an economist.

Illegal immigrants tend to take jobs that require almost no skills or even any native language comprehension. The most frequent jobs taken by illegals are positions in janitorial and lawn maintenance and agricultural base labor – particularly arduous, tiring and demeaning tasks – for pay quite often under the table at rates below the Federally mandated minimum wage. These are jobs Americans wouldn't do without getting paid Union scale, and the employers simply couldn't be viable economically with such a high labor cost.

In short: If you have a job right now – no, Dumbass!

How can immigration possibly help?

In the high-skilled H1B Visa groups, having the optimum number of job-ready skilled workers in their respective industries decreases the turnaround time from thought to market on time-saving, energy-saving - even life-saving technologies.

Agriculture hires truckloads of illegals to pick fruits and vegetables for about half the cost of a minimum-wage salary (once taxes and required benefits are calculated), thus allowing some schmo in Bangor, ME to buy a freshly-picked head of lettuce for a buck and a half in the middle of February. If the farm industry went through legal channels to acquire field labor, either prices of fresh produce would skyrocket or the Federal Government would have to double its farm subsidies, thus increasing deficits. (Don’t get me started on farm subsidies… free-market economy my nutsack!)

Why do we have to cater to immigrants?

Perhaps my paraphrasing muddles the meaning of this question too much. Closer to the customary phraseology: “How come everydamnthing is written in Spanish and English anymore? Why cain’t them #$^#$ing %&%$ers learn to speak English like the rest of us?”

If you want to blame somebody for the multilingual business phenomenon, hang it on 2006 Nobel Prize winner Mohammed Younnus. His concept of the “microloan” – loaning incredibly small amounts of money to woefully poor entrepreneurs at affordable interest rates – both empowered the poor to pull themselves out of the death spiral of poverty and proved to Big Business that “there’s money in them there beaners”, since Younnus’s Grameen Bank was quite profitable in their microloan sector.

The United States Government does not require any business anywhere to post or print their instructions, legal notices or hazard warnings in any particular language – although English is pretty much understood to be standard. Businesses do such a thing in order to cater to the largest potential market. Multi-national manufacturers print their manuals in multiple languages so they can run just one set out to the printers and stuff them into packages on the assembly line without regard for the unit’s destination of sale. ATM’s and POS terminals are multilingual to increase business and minimize customer service costs due to employee translation issues. It’s all about the Benjamins, baby – Big Daddy Gubmint has nothing to do with that.

I understand that some communities close to the Mexican border have passed local ordinances to post all official notices in Spanish, and a few states are considering such policies statewide. Well, my friends, that is where voting comes into play – if you don’t like the bilingual stuff, get off your puffy duffs and vote against it. If the ordinances pass anyway and local bilinguality still burns your bacon to an intolerable crisp, move. I hear North Dakota is lovely this time of year.

There. Yes, it’s long, but not nearly as long as a quiet bar discussion over a televised baseball game degenerating into a drunken chest-thumping slur-tossing bitchfest between Hempy von Organic and Redneck McCoorsfunnel after a long day of pondering macroeconomic conundrums and stifling the urge to punch that rat-turd agent of mine in the dick. He doesn’t need to call Yours Truly Keith “K. Russell” to get the cock-knock – on sheer principle I’ll gladly comp him.