← Back to context

Comment by dcow

4 hours ago

I find the idea the only immigrants can do low skill labor kinda… obtuse. Maybe Americans should pick their own crops instead of living in a delusion that certain labor is beneath them. Boomer era “all my kids are going to get white collar jobs” type thinking isn’t sustainable.

9 comments

dcow

Reply
bubblethink  3 hours ago

It's not beneath them per se. It's just that this trade only makes sense for a certain slice of the population at a certain time in their life. The immigrant is willing to work in that job because what is offered is not just the salary but something more (chance to immigrate, stability, arbitrage, etc.). It's similar to research assistants or grad students in universities. They are doing cutting edge research for peanuts because what they are getting is something more (degree, skills, future earning potential). It's hard to replace this dynamic. Or in other words, the dollar value of the intangibles is so high that if you were to put a price on it, it would make your business unviable.

  • trelane  28 minutes ago

    > research assistants or grad students in universities

    These are not fully trained scientists, but rather trainees. As such, they don't get paid the same as a fully trained scientist. Like how a journeyman is paid more than an apprentice electrician.

    Of course, they are also underpaid, too. Ask any grad student union.

    > It's hard to replace this dynamic. Or in other words, the dollar value of the intangibles is so high that if you were to put a price on it, it would make your business unviable.

    Yes, it's very hard to pay your workers a liveable wage if everyone else is exploiting their workers by underpaying them.

    All you're saying is that we've built exploiting labor (foreigners, interns, trainees) into our economy.

999900000999  3 hours ago

I’d only say change the system to provide a pathway to residency. If you’re willing to work 12 hour days to ensure my fat American born self keeps eating , you deserve a spot here.

One of my former partners was making around 200k. Her grandparents cleaned homes.

The idea is that you come here and your life is crappy low paid work, but your kids and their kids have amazing careers.

  • dcow  3 hours ago

    I agree with the spirit of your comment. But what often gets overlooked is that we do have a pathway to permanent residency and naturalization. It involves demonstrating that you are willing and able to be a citizen, not just do labor. The fact that a large number of actual citizens probably aren’t equipped to perform their civic duties doesn’t excuse it. We can change the laws on what it takes to be a citizen but if it were easy to redefine citizenship I’d imagine we’d have already done it.

deadbabe  3 hours ago

Immigrants aren’t the only ones who can do low skill labor, machines can do it too.

But doing any kind of labor that a machine can do, is beneath your capacity as a human, so you shouldn’t do that job, you should do other jobs that require human effort or where the quality of human output is valued.

  • bumby  14 minutes ago

    Even if machines could do it, it doesn’t mean they could do it at or below the equivalent cost.

    I also disagree with the automation point regarding what humans should do. As we see with current AI, many creative tasks can be automated but it doesn’t make them unfulfilling human endeavors.

soco  3 hours ago

Yet here we are. They even recognized officially (Labor Department, October '25) that Americans are not willing to pick up these jobs.