https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/immigrants-contribute-greatly-to-us-economy-despite-administrations

there, i linked a study

it even has a thumbnail picture of a brown person working

it gives us cheap tomatoes, big deal

that's my point though

fuck cheap tomatoes

we only need cheap tomatoes because we have a non-existent safety net for our citizenry

what matters to most of us isn't actual GDP growth or the bloating of massive businesses, we only rlly care if the economy is afloat and whether people can provide for their families

it's like how Mcdonald's could pay everyone 15 dollar minimum wage, and it would raise the price of their food like... 2 cents

we have to force them to do shit like that

i'd take a downscaled GDP for a self sufficient economy where someone can provide for a family of 4+ with just 1 working family memeber

any day of the week

also fuck the GDP

and fuck the stock market lol

minimum wage def needs to be raised

that doesnt really represent the People in the way it's portrayed as

Also i read through the study and i don't dispute any of the data but it ties into what i said earlier

most of these jobs can be done by the native populus

doing the things we need to do to actually help our people, including immigrants, would probably lower GDP and stock prices

but, on the flipside, 500K people wouldn't be homeless

native populous truly doesn't want to pick tomatoes tho

and 40-50K people wouldn't die every year from lack of access to health care

it's just there is really shitty infrastructure in allowing them to get to these jobs, i know for a fact it's true in the UK but im gonna assume american education is pretty shit for getting people actual careers too

yeah

it is

but a lot of people blame the immigrants for that

"infecting our economy with low-skilled slave work", in a sense

when really it's our own systems that are failing

and we can also have immigration and improve our standard of living, they go hand in hand

In that sense, i would rather guarantee the native populace had strong career prospects which can fill up these critical fields, i.e nursing or etc instead of them failing school and being unemployed; instead we just ignore that issue and siphon labourers from other countries

they had a cut back on immigrants in one of the southern states before and they couldnt find enough people to pick tomatoes

i think people would rather pick tomatoes than work retail for 8 dollars an hour, if picking tomatoes paid what it's actually worth

btw most jobs like that will probably be lot to mechanisation sooner or later

not necessarily nursing ofc

but definitely manual labour jobs like that

i think there was a study on it i cant remember but ill do a quick look

and when automization takes hold, it will make everything worse for us, because we rely on jobs given to us by profit-seeking corporations

and we don't really have a safety net to speak of

At least we all agree GDP is garbage

it seems to me that the only reason migrants / immigration hurts an economy is because of a "free market" philosophy

i think mechanised labour is good to some capacity but obviously i'd rather see the populace have good job security where they can provide for themselves and have systems to fall back on i.e safety nets