alt Hacker News> at the cost of the American worker/Graduate
The old myth of "immigrants are taking our jobs". The American economy (and all western countries) would be substantially weaker without all those immigrants, highly skilled or not. Without them, the agricultural sector would collapse, the health care system would barely hang by a thread, and next time you go use a toilet at your companies office or a random shopping mall, try to find out who cleans it regularly (hint: that person is most certainly not born in your country nor highly educated).
Immigrants grow the economy, if anything. They make your life better.
That I even have to read this nonsense in a place with so smart and highly educated people as HN makes me pretty sad.
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>who cleans it regularly (hint: that person is most certainly not born in your country nor highly educated).
If there was no immigrant willing to do it for a bare minimum wage, the mall would have to pay a local more to keep it clean. If there was no immigrant to work on farms for the bare minimum, farmers would have to pay locals a decent wage to make them do the same work. There's no such thing as a worker shortage, only wages that are too low to attract workers.
When the "economy" grows, that doesn't make my life better. My life gets better when I can command a higher salary for my labor, something I can't do when companies are allowed to flood the market with low cost foreign labor. This is so obvious I don't understand how supporters can be so smug and wrong at the same time.