Markk wrote:canpakes wrote:What kept you from paying a higher rate to laborers when you were doing work on your own home? Why did you choose the guys in the Home Depot parking lot as opposed to 'more skilled' folks?
It has nothing to do with skill, it was about ease and price. I needed some yard work done for a day, and it was cheaper. But I did take a big chance becasue they were not insured. Me being a hypocrite does not change the fact that illegal immigrants lower wages for construction workers...in fact it proves my point.
What do/did you do for a living? How does illegal immigration raise your wages.
Let's look at that question in the context of the example of your yard work. Res Ipsa provided the answer, in the post immediately following yours:
"
You're suggesting that you saved money on your yard work, and that presumably helps your money go a little further? Cool."
For your situation, the use of non-resident laborers allowed you to stretch your purchasing power for whatever task you had... or allowed you to sub it out to someone else rather than do it yourself, given the comparison between how much you see your own time is worth, versus paying out-of-pocket for
corner standers to do it instead. You obviously felt that this value proposition was a
win for you, or you wouldn't have done this, right?
So, while this situation didn't directly increase your wealth through a paycheck, it did
preserve your wealth to some degree, and allowed what you earn to be better directed towards meeting other goals.
And I didn't ask this question to try to point out any 'hypocrisy' in your situation. All that I'm pointing out is that this cycle begins with
the employer, who hires illegal laborers because he is first attempting to either gain a competitive bidding edge (preserving his own wealth), or to allow himself to keep more dollars in his pocket versus payout for laborers (again, preserving his own wealth). What ends up happening, if the pool of illegal laborers is large enough - or if the pool of unskilled and willing legal residents is also large enough - is that a race to the bottom begins with wages, and every business becomes mired within the game in order to survive, even if they were not the ones to initiate it.
The mere presence of illegal laborers isn't so much the real problem as is/was
the desire by business to gain a competitive edge by using it. It's not as if any illegal laborer ever
forced an employer to hire him or her.
Given that, how do you want to fix the issue?