Intergenerational perspectives on immigration (and Clinton v. Trump)
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)).
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