Asymmetrical Information

Quoting the quote Farrel:

The Economist never adverts to the fact that the Smithfields Foods management has been found by the NLRB to have threatened that it would report undocumented immigrants to the authorities if they voted for a union.

Uhm...so if I follow that correctly, a company illegally hired persons who were themselves illegally in the United States, and said company then used illegal tactics to prevent the illegal workers from unionizing -- namely, by threatening to report the workers' illegal status to concerned authorities.

Fodder for a Marx Brothers movie, possibly. Not paricularly useful the way Mr. Farrel would project it.

Fodder for a Marx Brothers movie, possibly. Not paricularly useful the way Mr. Farrel would project it.

It is also interesting to reflect that the NLRB apparently supports the idea of allowing illegal aliens to unionize, thereby increasing the threat they pose to the non-union American laborers they normally compete with.

But then unions have never cared about workers who weren't current or prospective members, so that's hardly a surprise.

Of course that's what good reporting is. The function of a reporter is to rabble-rouse until folks are rioting in the streets demanding a bigger, more expensive, and above all more intrusive government.

Um...isn't it?

:)

Apparently, all three comenters support a U.S. company that hires illegal immigrants and then threatens to inform on them to the authorities if they attempt to exercise rights available to legal immigrants and citizens. Shouldn't it be a crime to hire illegal immigrants? If it shouldn't be, why shouldn't illegal immigrants have all the rights of legal workers?

Meanwhile, Jane Galt apparently believes that if one illegal immigrant says he's happy to be working in the U.S., that proves that all employers using illegal immigrants treat them fairly. That's journalism, but it isn't proof.

Shouldn't it be a crime to hire illegal immigrants?

It is a crime. I am not a Lawyer, but it might be a Felony Crime. People turn the other way because it is easier to live in denial than to face reality.

Fact is, if there is a job that American Citizens won't do (because the pay is too low since the revenue generated from the work is too low), then maybe that job shouldn't be in existance in this country? The fact that it is in existance means that we ordinary Americans are receiving lifestyle benefits that we are not entitled to.... $9/hour to mow your lawn for some illegal you just picked up at the corner of a Home Dept, is not the going rate for that labour. You just broke the law. If you aren't willing to pay $15-$20/hour (what that labour would cost in the free market if you were forced to hire legal citizens) then mow your own damn lawn.

Much as I enjoy Crooked Timber for certain purposes, the unjustifiably smug and nasty tone there keeps my number of visits down. Their grasp of economics is laughable; their criticism of anyone who disagrees with a given shibboleth is invariably ad hominem or based on ideology, not idea. I first read there of Jane's dispute with Farrell; even his one-sided presentation made it clear to me Jane was right and he was wrong. He seems incapable of grasping this.

Oh, and Paul, I am a lawyer, it is a crime, and it is not a felony. Studies indicate (somewhat murkily) that illegal immigrants may arguably push down bottom-end wages for US citizens by about 5% (I've seen 3% to 9% suggested). And speaking as someone who always mows his own lawn, how do you know what the market rate for this work would be in a counterfactual world? That's a useful talent.

Shelby,

Part of the reason why it is a crime to hire illegal aliens is because they will (invaribly) violate other laws, not just the law that says you must first get a Green Card before you touch that lawn-mower in Los Angeles. As a Lawyer, you probably already know this. I'm an Arizona resident and we are swamped with illegal labour. It is good and it is bad. It is good that illegals work so cheap, and people who could not normally afford to have certain things done for them, they are now spoiled (spoiled to the level that the ordinary citizen of Ohio, isn't.) It's bad because many of the things we take for granted (normal, expected, business practices) do not exist. And we wind up getting bitten in the @ss as a result.

For example, if I hire 5 illegals to build me a retaining wall or fence in my yard, they will do that work on a daily cash basis. Each day they come, they do some more work, and they collect their daily wages. So far, so good. Then they drive away to God only knows where, to live. After 3 days into a 5 day project, they don't return. No calls. No way to contact them. Nothing. I have a half built wall, and no labour to finish the job. What happened? It turns out that the $600, 27 year old truck they were driving (illegally with no insurance), with bald tires, no breaks, and a questionable transmission, collided with a mini-van full of kids on their way to Soccer Practice. All those kids are dead, and the illegals just walked away from the accident, and the FBI has no way to trace that car back to the owner (since it wasn't registered properly.) I am responsibel for the death of those kids. If I hadn't have hired them to work in my yard, they wouldn't be here in our country illegally. I know, we are making a lot of assumptions here, but this is the Devil that we (as a society) "Dance With", if we entertain the idea that some laws are worth following and others are not. If hiring illegal aliens to do your work is a stupid crime (that should be made legal) then work to change the law. If you can't do that (can't change the law), then realize that the law was put there for a reason.

And respect it.

And speaking as someone who always mows his own lawn, how do you know what the market rate for this work would be in a counterfactual world? That's a useful talent.

I would know it the same way you would. I just read the cardboard sign that the illegals are holding and showing me as I pull into the parking lot at Home Depot. Sign says "$9/hour."

I asked the next-door neighbor's son how much he would charge to mow my lawn. He said $10, and he gets to use my power mower. It takes me 10 minutes to do the job (since most of my yard is gravel.) Even if it took him half an hour to do the same thing, you do the math.

I presume the kid next door was weighing the inconvenience of your one job versus staying inside the air-conditioned house with the XBox? If he was running a regular business and had to make proper time/materials estimates and concern himself with load-balancing, he probably would charge less than $10 for ten minutes' work, or else perform a bit of general weeding, trimming, and yard clean-up for that money.

But meanwhile, you can also do the math by looking up any number of professional landscaping services, which typically include mowing and trimming services in their repotoire. They supply their own equipment, but they likewise charge a whole lot more than $9/hour.

The fact that Mr. Queiroz worked at such a bastion of evil, like the Smithfield plant, and lived to tell about it seems to me a confirmation of the American Dream. Here this guy works a difficult and possibly fatal job for $10 an hour, and he managed to buy a house in Mexico and start a business with his brother. That's exactly the mobility that we exhort all the time. We should be proud that this country is free enough that an illegal immigrant can work for a sleazy meatpacker and use it as a stepping-stone to bigger and better things.

But meanwhile, you can also do the math by looking up any number of professional landscaping services, which typically include mowing and trimming services in their repotoire. They supply their own equipment, but they likewise charge a whole lot more than $9/hour.

You are absolutely right they charge more than $9/hour. They also employ the same illegals that I could have picked up at Home Depot. And those illegals make the same $9/hour working for them (in my yard), that they would have made directly working for me.

Paul,

When I said "counterfactual" I referred to your words: "what that labour would cost in the free market if you were forced to hire legal citizens". In the absence of that circumstance, it's hard to know what it would actually cost. I know that when my cousins, as teenagers, ran a professional lawn-mowing service, they wouldn't have dared charge $10 for a 10-minute (or half-hour) job. Not because illegal aliens would've taken the work instead, but because other kids in the area would have.

I don't mean by this to endorse illegal immigration, or to mitigate the crimes they sometimes (but not "invariably") commit. It's a messy tangle of good and bad. One point about your scenario is that you get what you pay for -- if you don't want (presumably) unreliable illegals doing the work, you can always hire legal workers yourself, or require your wall-building/lawn-care service to hire only legal ones. You'll pay more, and presumably get the benefit of greater reliability and/or expertise.

I'm not going to give any prescriptions for improving immigration policy, except to broadly suggest we should make it easier for people to work temporarily in a legal framework while focusing on improving the skill-set of citizens and long-term legal residents. If we can be doing more productive work, while someone else does the necessary but low-skill jobs, so much the better.

Somehow, the notion of an illegal immigrants' union seems a little counterintuitive. The reason to hire them in the first place is that they are cheaper than the domestic labor force (legal immigrants & domestic labor). Why would an employer risk the liability?

I'm not going to give any prescriptions for improving immigration policy, except to broadly suggest we should make it easier for people to work temporarily in a legal framework while focusing on improving the skill-set of citizens and long-term legal residents.

I'm going to broadly suggest that we are all living in denial that (as a society) we seem to think that labour laws involving the prevention of hiring illegal aliens, is bullsh*t. We know that these laws are almost never enforced (because the broad majority of people in this country are lazy and refuse to wash their own dishes), and we reaping the results.

If it is a bad law, then change it and let everyone come across the border. If it is a meaningful law, then enforce it. Build the damn wall on the Rio Grande, round up as many of the 11,000,000 illegals as we can, send them packing, and if they storm on Mexico City in Revolution demanding change to their political corruption, so be it.

For a nation with as many natural resouces as Mexico has, coupled with it's gorgeous climate and gorgeous beaches, it is shameful and disgusting that their nation requires exporting all their poorest poor to our country to find work, while importing some $20,000,000,000 of "Capital Flight" from those illegals to keep their familes back home in Mexico, fed.

Strange that our neighbor to the North (with a so-so climate, and lousy beaches) does not feel the need to export their poorest to our country to find work, only to send the money home.

Paul - Mexico exports people of higher than average wealth to the US, not its poorest of the poor.

Mexico exports people of higher than average wealth to the US, not its poorest of the poor.

Where did you get that little piece of information?

I'm going to broadly suggest that we are all living in denial that (as a society) we seem to think that labour laws involving the prevention of hiring illegal aliens, is bullsh*t. We know that these laws are almost never enforced (because the broad majority of people in this country are lazy and refuse to wash their own dishes), and we reaping the results.

But seriously, folks . . . it's not enough that The Economist quotes HRW; it must not only reprint its accusations at great length, but also endorse it, or it's partisan hackery.

Tangential, but not irrelevant -- it's worth noting HRW's "probe" of the Gaza beach explosion a few weeks ago, in which they falsely passed off one of their ex-government pets as an expert. Said "expert" proceeded to make authoritative statements about how wounds and blast craters were proof that the incident was the result of Israeli shelling, claims which he has now dropped with no explanation.

So even ignoring Jane's point, it's not obvious why HRW is an organization to which Attention Must Be Paid.

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