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Originally Posted by Mavdog
street corner panhandling is now outlawed in dallas. nobody can do solicitations. this means the firemen, too, so it came at a cost.
I'm not sure the majority of homeless want to work.
one failure of the pew study is no differentiation in type of job, in many cases those hispanics are doing the labor while others are doing a lot of the other.
to me, immigrants are those who come here because they want to work.
I don't see there are jobs americans shouldn't do, if the borders were closed those jobs would be filled. that will come at a high cost imo productivity will decrease while unit cost will increase.
that's a wicked double whammy.
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You are definitely wrong about the productivity side, productivity would rise: if you take away the lowest-wage workers you are taking away the least productive workers in the economy and the average productivity of workers will rise.
**note** this assumes well functioning labor markets. However, the fact that illegals are constrained from fully participating in the market, and are not always able to work in the highest level of job their skills would enable them to accomplish, means that there are frictions imposed in the labor market-place that stop it from reaching its optimum equilibrium. Being the good economist I am, I’ll just ignore this ugly little fact for now, by assuming it away. Economists ALWAYS assume away any little facts that interfere with their argument
) **note**
In a market equilibrium (where employers have to compete for workers AND workers have to compete for jobs-- ie no big surpluses or shortages of jobs) wages will equal the value of the marginal productivity of services they provide, so wages are low because the marginal value of the work provided by each individual worker is low. Hence illegals are not just the lowest PAID workers, they are the lowest VALUE workers as well, when considered individually.
However, taken together the TOTAL value of the work accomplished may be very great. So what happens when you take away a large proportion of the menial laborers, who taken as a whole perform many necessary functions in the economy? Do those activities no longer get accomplished (no trash pick-up, no brush clearing, no painting, etc…)? No, of course not. Without a reliable pool of cheap cheap workers, early on firms might pull back on the level of services provided (the doom and gloom scenario --nobody picks up the trash--) but this means that the VALUE of those services increases, which will attract more capital to those industries which will push up the productivity of the workers that are still in those industries, and wages will increase. (AND, that capital is attracted AWAY from those industries where it is having the least impact… ie from industries where it will have the least impact on labor productivity to have a little bit less investment)
Productivity of the economy on the whole (as measured by the average productivity of labor) increases.