One bonus of spending two weeks on a cruise ship is that one meets a wide array of people. The roughly 2,400 guests on our Serenade of the Seas Baltic Sea cruise came from 52 different countries. Among these were Americans from every region of the U.S. and with a much wider range of political views than are typically aired in Massachusetts.
Due to the upcoming election and perhaps the media’s frenzied portrayal of the Clinton v. Trump decision as a momentous one that will affect all Americans’ daily lives, there was a lot of political discussion. On the immigration issue, one pattern that I noticed was that at least some people tend to vote their checkbook. Some older Americans expressed positive attitudes toward immigration. They were done working and therefore wouldn’t be competing with anyone for a job. They typically own property that will increase in value if the U.S. population is expanded to 600 million via immigration. Asked what the advantages of immigration were to an average existing American citizen they talked about how immigrants would do jobs that “Americans didn’t want to do,” such as prepare and serve food in senior citizens’ housing. In other words, prices for consumers of unskilled labor would be lower. On the other hand, some young people, including college students, were negative about immigration and therefore positive about Donald Trump. They cited traffic jams, competition for jobs, higher taxes to pay for welfare benefits and other handouts to immigrants, and costs and security hassles related to Islamic violence at public events or gatherings.
The ship itself is a good example of why working-age Americans might rationally vote to obstruct a free worldwide labor market (one method of obstruction being blocking immigration to the U.S.). There were workers from 64 different countries on the ship (flag parade video that I captured). The ship itself, a magnificent machine that has been kept in near-perfect condition, was built in Germany in 2001-2003. It is a floating town of about 3,500 passengers and crew and includes most of the businesses and municipal functions of a town: retail, restaurants, hotel, electricity generation, water desalinization, sewage treatment, legal and regulatory compliance, health care (doctor and two nurses), repairs and maintenance, cable TV, Internet, live entertainment, etc. All of this is accomplished to a higher-than-typical-American standard at a lower-than-typical-American cost by a crew that includes very few Americans. Americans would find work in a free labor market, of course, but we wouldn’t be sought-after. (Economists would say that in a truly free labor market the unemployment rate is always close to 0% because eventually the market will clear with workers accepting jobs at low wages, but this isn’t relevant in the modern welfare state because living on government handouts may yield a better material lifestyle than working at a market-clearing wage (and working at a market-clearing wage may be illegal due to minimum wage laws; see Puerto Rico)).
> Some young people…opposed to immigration…cited…”traffic jams, competition for jobs, higher taxes to pay for welfare benefits and other handouts to immigrants, and costs and security hassles related to Islamic violence at public events or gatherings”
That’s embarrassing. Is this a failure of young people, or is this as good as it gets? What is the coherent adult argument against immigration?
The argument is that immigrants will blow themselves up and try to establish sharia law in our country. We must build the wall.
The adult argument is that there is some number of immigrants between zero and the entire population of the world that will be optimal for the well being of the people already here, and the notions that it is lower than the expected number of immigrants that will come in under present policies and that some care should be given in deciding which immigrants should be admitted can be entertained.
The adult argument is that there is a distribution of abilities and even low IQ Americans deserve to make a decent living. The minimum wage in Australia is around $15. We could have the same in US but instead we choose to immiserate our own low IQ workers and then we blame them for being born stupid.
bjk: We could have a $25/hour minimum wage in the U.S.! Or $50/hour for that matter. Nothing in our Constitution would stop Congress from passing that law.
[Personally I think $600/hour would be a fair minimum wage because most Americans do more useful work than a Boston-area divorce litigator and $600/hour is what a competent downtown divorce lawyer earns (finally getting a 1040 income of about $1 million per year; see http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Massachusetts for what they’re able to obtain for their plaintiff clients).]
It seems as though the Australia story is not as simple as one number: http://cafehayek.com/2013/03/australias-minimum-wage.html