alt Hacker NewsThey don't want their son to do it because immigrants prevent the salaries of those jobs to rise naturally. Mass immigration is capitalism's answer to the Baumol law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
The "locals don't want to do those jobs" comptemptuous rethoric of the bourgeois left has always been false, locals don't want to clean the sewers for the minimal wage, but will do it for a proper salary. My grandfather was a cook in Paris, he was making a decent wage and could buy a summer house back then.
Now the restaurant where he used to work has a Sri Lankan who works for half the minimum wage (half of his hours are undeclared) and lives in a slum to save on housing costs.
Yeah, locals don't want to live like slaves, so what? Is that the end state that we must reach through mass immigration?
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Immigrants in Switzerland don't "live like slaves," and I'm perfectly happy I don't have to clean the sewers, thank you very much.
Why don’t you let people decide who works with who in a free market and if you are worried about low wages introduce higher minimum wages.
Or, what I actually prefer is face who you are and say I don’t want those people who are a generation or two behind in wealth? Why the gymnastics? As if there are people pf your kind who would have done these jobs but they are just sitting around or doing rocket science because the pay is %15 lower than what they desire.
Just ridiculous.
I’m somewhat sympathetic with that critique on mass immigration in regards to dropping wages at the low end, but as I never see the anti immigration folk push for regulating or attacking the companies hiring said immigrants, I am comfortable just assuming it’s racism.
Everytime I get into the weeds with anti immigration people I feel like I run through the IQ meme with “it’s just racism” on the low and high ends and {insert whatever alternative argument they have} in the middle.
> The "locals don't want to do those jobs" comptemptuous rethoric of the left has always been false, locals don't want to clean the sewers for the minimal wage, but will do it for a proper salary.
apologies, but those of us in the Left agree more with the second part of your sentence than the Left. Are you mixing Leftists and Liberals, perchance?
The problem there isn't immigration, it's exploitation of workers. If the person paying that Sri Lankan were to go to jail for his violation of labor law, the situation would be different.
I find it hard to believe the kids of the Swiss elite would be cleaning sewers if not for the low pay.
You’re not really accounting for where the money for those “naturally rising wages” come from. A restaurant in the US is making the same (or frankly less) than it used to 10 years ago accounting for inflation. They can’t really afford to pay people more because of the higher consumer index. So the only real option is shutting down. Or in the US for farming. They already run on razor thin margins with a lot of variability from weather, pests etc. They were essentially making it work because of illegal immigrant labor. Now that Florida increased its crackdown on illegal labor around 30% of orange orchards have disappeared in a few years and probably a lot more as time goes on.
If you want to go back to your ethnostate fantasy, people are going to have to go back to consuming what you can produce in your own country. So Switzerland is going back to a diet of essentially bread and cheese and frankly I don’t think they grow enough grain for the bread.
Locals are not going to clean sewers and you know it. Society in general made it very clear over the last decades that jobs like that are shit, only losers are doing them, and that you need a degree to be worth something. If you want to blame something for this, blame neoliberalism. It helped create a culture in which educational credentials, professional careers, and market prestige became dominant measures of success, making many forms of manual labor appear less desirable.
That's as stupid as it is old. Locals would do it for a proper salary. But the same locals do not want to pay the proper salary!
Turn the brain on from time to time!