Steve James wrote:That's right. There should be a corresponding spike in unemployment if new immigrants are affecting jobs. Now, where you are right is that if a company can hire an immigrant for 1/2 what it pays a citizen, it will prefer hiring an immigrant. However, if there were no immigrants, that company would still pay citizens as little as it could. If there are lots of competitors for that job, it will pay less. If there is no competition, it will pay what is necessary to attract workers.
I think that's pretty much how it works.
The unemployment spike occurs in the specific time and region where an industry is impacted by significant changes to the labor pool. This may not be measured directly by national unemployment trends that have perhaps multiple years of periodicity. However, when we look at specific industries, like where you used to work in construction (did you not mention once this was the reason you changed jobs?), and recognize that the labor market for an industry like that has been taken over by immigrants, both legal and illegal, where previously citizens were doing the job, something major has happened to that labor pool.
Also, wages for tha industry have remained stagnant during a time when inflation was on its normal rise, which is expected if the labor pool is increased and/or changed for people willing to accept less because of their standard of living or legal status, but this probably has multiple causes and proving a direct connection to local wages when and where the displacement took place needs some data. However, the change in the labor market proves there was displacement and therefore unemployment occurred for a time because large groups of people don't just jump from one industry to the next without interruption to their income stream.
Otoh, how many jobs for citizens have Bezos and Musk created?
I'm not sure what you're getting at, but I'll play. I think that Bezos is a net job destroyer, as well as a culture destroyer, just as is the case with Wal-Mart. Amazon (and Wal-Mart) completely destroy local businesses, such as book stores and fish bait shops, including their local supply chains. They then hire an overall much lower number of people for lower paying wages and make them uniformly obedient to the corporate agenda, as well as partially dependent on government services when they were previously independent and diverse.
Amazon is run by the richest man in the history of the planet, an oligo-technocrat who has shown himself to be intolerant and merciless towards his competitors and workers, just as the corporate logic, bereft of any morality demands. Are Amazon service centers not totalitarian work camps with inhuman conditions, enforced by sci-fi dystopian technologies, providing only subsistence wages? Amazon is not a net overall job creator, it is a net job destroyer, which it accomplishes through monopolistic capitalism that also destroys local culture and knowledge. Their symbol, the kindle, means book burning, which they are accomplishing now by banning ideological diversity after taking over the market.
Musk, I don't know as much about because one of his areas is actual production of goods, so he may be a net job creator. As a former CEO of the totalitarian enforcer of establishment orthodoxy
Paypal, he might be just as merciless and amoral as all the other oligo-technocrats. I guess we'll know for certain after he puts is into a re-education camp where we can earn green credits to buy his fancy cars and learn to be less carbon dependent or some shit.