At the progressive journal Democracy Jonathan Blanks speaks out in praise of the bracero program:
And as my colleague Alex Nowrasteh has written, a large reason we have so many unauthorized immigrants in the first place is that the government shut down programs that allowed people to come and work legally. Among these was the Bracero program that allowed seasonal migration for labor…
as I’ve been saying for years. That we need a guest worker program in the United States is obvious and I can only speculate about why such programs are resisted so vehemently.
However, other than that he’s opposed to Trump’s wall (so am I) and doesn’t like enforcement of existing law, he doesn’t elaborate on what he thinks a “sane immigration policy” would be.
I can tell you what my idea of a sound immigration policy would be: a guest worker program specifically tailored for Mexican workers, strict workplace enforcement of the laws, and requiring employers to pay prevailing wages or higher for workers brought into the country. I also like the idea of a central clearing house that employers would be required to advertise on before being given H-1B visas to bring workers in from outside the country.
Prevailing wages, eh? Now I admit that Naples, FL might not be the best test case, but this was relayed to me recently by two separate owners of local eateries subjected to my bad habit of chatting up any business owner who will talk, after I noted they had no Mexican labor.
They can’t get cooks or waiters to show up for work on time, or stay with their firms any length of time. Twenty-somethings just drifting through life. Both, one from Detroit and one from Chicago, are thinking about throwing in the towel and going elsewhere, because they find themselves doing the jobs of the absentees all the time. One guys theme is a variety of upscale Detroit hot dogs, the other upscale Mexican. The slave wages they offer? Both reported about a thousand cash per week (and I’m sure those employees report every cent of comp to the IRS……snicker) With a few weeks off every year that’s $48-$50K per year, for the high skill job of making hotdogs, fries, soup, tacos etc. Not good enough.
Hard for me to imagine that Mexicans wouldn’t jump at it. The not-so-greatest generation, not so much.
I do not mean to notice the turd in the punchbowl, but upscale fast food restaurants do not tend to do well. They have a very limited customer base. The are too expensive for many people, and they are too “low brow” for many others.
For the agriculture industry, there could be little better than the availability of cheap labor. This will force the industry to choose between developing mechanical solutions or going out of business.
I dislike Millennials, but they are not the reason the country is “going to hell in a handbasket”. It is their parents fault. They have been coddled their whole life, and they have absolutely no idea of how the real works.
Their health insurance is subsided until they are 26. They are on their parents car insurance and cell phone plans. They live rent-free, and they are burdened with making few “life decisions”. Why would they expect adulthood to be any different?
Rather than the world changing them, they will change the world to suit them. When the hippies finally had to grow-up, they did not begin living like their parents. They transformed the 1950’s model into the 1970’s model.
The Beaver did not start living like Ward and June Cleaver. He bought a wash-and-wear polyester leisure suit. He started snorting cocaine and dancing to disco music.
Millennials will not decrease government intrusion. They will increase it. Mommy and daddy have taken care of them well into adulthood, and the millennials will transform the government into their surrogate parents.
Everybody has some excuse for why their situation is different. I try to push my stepson to stand on his own, but she wants him in a playpen. He is 24, and we are not helping him by making life easy.
The statutory purpose of H-1B visas is to bring people with essential skills unavailable in this country in. It’s not to push down wages.
Although I’d love to see some Congressman running on a platform of pushing down wages by bringing in workers from overseas at half the cost of Americans. Sounds like a winning formula to me!
“..but upscale fast food restaurants do not tend to do well.”
Yeah, that’s what initially made me want to talk to this guy. $6-7 hotdogs. But his problem isn’t really attracting customers. They flock there. But he’s constantly finding himself pissing them off by being understaffed. I asked him if he could just pay more, but his response was that its hard to make money when you are paying wait staff $50K per head. That’s a lot of hot dogs or lobster tacos. I don’t see myself doing employee exit interviews 😉 but I have never yet seen a business model based upon transformation of unmotivated employees by a few extra bucks above the national median income. Not in the hospitality trade anyway.
H1-B
That’s a different market, with different dynamics. I simply don’t know if those skills do not exist in American employees. Anecdotally, I doubt that is so. So it sounds like a wage play to me. I’m not familiar enough with the practicalities of those skill sets or employees to prescribe policy.