Even so, it was the longest and most peaceful border in the world for over 100 years. The border between China and Russia is a long one, but the two were basically cold war enemies.
We get it. The nation state has no meaning for you. However, to solve the problem of the minimum wage, by allowing free flow one way (as Mexico does not allow illegal immigration), all you do is bring the standard of living down, between US and Mexican standards. I do believe in the nation state. I have no problem if the policies of my country allow for more growth and prosperity than others. If Mexico decides it's interested in growing its own economy, they can change the direction of their own country.
Your nation state bit is a straw man because you're making an argument on my behalf that I do not make. Borders are where the nation state's laws and obligations to its citizens and others within basically end. This is supposed to be a "free country" so it makes no sense to build a wall around it to keep people who want to be free out. That wall is a recent thing and racially motivated. Free country, as in free market, as in you don't restrict who participates. There is a rather free flow of people from the US to there. I know at least half a dozen americans that live in Mexico and commute to work in the USA. They do need a passport, but as late as 20 years after the immigration law was passed you didn't need one.
You cannot continue to take more and more from business owners, in the form of taxes and then force them to pay even more money to there help. Minimum wage jobs were never expected to be the type of jobs where you would be able to raise a family.
But some people need assistance because they are not being paid enough. So in a sense, we the taxpayers are compensating these low income workers with money that could be paid to them by their employer. If you have a corporation like WalMart that makes 16 billion a year in profit, while a great number of their employees require public assistance, what if they paid their workers more so that they required less assistance? If they gave have their profits to their employees, they could give each of their 2 million employees an extra $4,000 a year. Which is a big deal to people that poor. Also, corporations like WalMart have worked hard to smash employees attempts to negotiate a contract by smashing unions.
Put Walmart out of existence. Now who pays for the unemployed workers who used to work there? Public assistance. But instead of Walmart covering 70% of their needs and the taxpayer 30%, it will be the taxpayer covering 100%. As I wrote earlier, I have issues with Walmart. I'm not saying they couldn't do things better. Walmart's hiring strategy reminds me of google's ad network strategy. Google sells ads on sites like this one and many many that are smaller. Individually, none of these sites are big enough to warrant a sales guy trying to sell the ads for. Combined, all these little sites constitute what Google calls the "tail of the WWW" and is worth hiring many ad guys to sell the ads for. Walmart hires the tail of the workforce - people who command minimum wage or would command even less, and who don't stick with the company for very long. It makes sense that they don't stick because minimum wage jobs for the vast majority of workers are a stepping stone to something bigger and better. There are a lot of businesses, big and small, that churn each other's minimum wage employees. From perusing several message boards where people were describing their work experience at Walmart, the workers didn't complain about the pay as much as the aches and pains of having to do the physical labor parts (moving boxes around, stacking stuff on shelves, etc.). It was pretty common to see them talk about how their experience as cashier at Walmart was better or worse than being cashier at Walgreens. Getting a business unionized is not an easy thing. The unions are corrupt and in any large organization, you have people equally corrupt. Walmart has over a million employees, and just organizing them all to have a fair vote on the issue is a huge expense. I've seen news stories about Walmart and employees and unions over the years. Here's one that describes some of the issues. An unskilled 13 year employee of the company makes $12.40/hr or 1.5x or more of minimum wage and $2.30 over what Obama proposes. She organizes an employee based movement to unionize and the article talks about the results. Walmart has 1.4M employees. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-12-13/walmart-vs-dot-union-backed-our-walmart#p1 OUR Walmart, or Organization United for Respect at Walmart, the group of employees who defied one of the most powerful companies in America by holding protests at about 1,000 stores on the busiest day of the year for retailers. OUR Walmart says it has at least 4,000 members. The protests, on the Friday after Thanksgiving, involved about 500 of them, as well as many thousands of others sympathetic to their cause. (that's 4000 members and only 500 bothered to picket - out of 1.4M) ... Organizers at the UFCW felt the same way. In 2010 the union hired a veteran labor leader, Dan Schlademan, to be the director of “Making Change at Walmart,” a campaign it had just launched. “We needed to build something new,” says Schlademan. He connected with Murray and a few other Walmart employees and then turned to ASGK Public Strategies, the media and branding firm started by David Axelrod, a senior political adviser to President Obama. (Axelrod had sold his stake by 2010.) “There is a permanent political campaign around the legitimacy of Walmart on both sides,” says Nelson Lichtenstein, a history professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara and author of The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business. “Walmart hires operatives who are in and out of political campaigns. Unions enlist the hottest political consultants around.” On its side, Walmart had Leslie Dach, who had been a strategist in several Democratic campaigns and a vice chairman at public-relations firm Edelman. Dach was hired in 2006 in part to improve the company’s reputation, especially with liberal politicians and shoppers. By 2010 the company had reduced waste and energy use, tried to offer more affordable health insurance, and had supported Obamacare. At an analysts’ meeting that October, Dach said: “I think the numbers clearly show that customers and elected officials like us better. … And that makes it easier for us to site stores, makes it easier for us to stay out of the public limelight when we don’t want to be there.” (Corruption on both sides)
You are dismissing the idea of the citizen. We are free within our own country. We can import labor as we see fit, but I don't believe people can come uninvited and without approval. The larger issue, however, is that you and I have gone round and round on our philosophies of immigration and the nation state. I think you're an internationalist fool and you think I'm a close-minded nationalist. We're never going to agree. Your arguments I don't find convincing and vice versa.
They wouldn't be in danger of going out of business if they were still getting 8 billion in profit. But of course WalMart is an easy example because they make so much profit. We wouldn't want to drive industries out of business, but would that really happen, or is that just a scare tactic? We have a higher minimum wage in Oregon and I still see plenty of McDonald's and WalMarts around here. Fred Meyer's competes here with a wage substantially higher than minimum wage. It gets a little murkier with businesses like fast food franchices. The individual franchise would foot the minimum wage bill while the corporate profits remain untouched. But the franchises could negotiate a better contract with corporate. Let it trickle up. [
Who says people who immigrate here must become citizens? When you lived in countries overseas, were you citizen of those countries? I'm guessing not, or at least not in most cases. The constitution talks about Persons (capital P) to cover those who aren't citizens. I'm not an internationalist, just if you want "FREE" markets, then the source of Labor needs to be free. Not some subset.
The unemployment rate in Oregon is 1.1% higher than the national average. You're not going to drive industries out of business, you're going to drive people into homelessness. If you want to start up a big business that does $billions in profit and give it all away, go for it. Otherwise, I'm not sure anyone but the shareholders should be deciding what Walmart should do with theirs.
Michael Heumer is a rather famous professor of philosophy at University of Colorado, Boulder. If you've ever watched the TED talks on Netflix or other sources, you may gave seen his presentation. He is a Libertarian. He wrote this tl;dr essay for the Social Theory and Practice publication. http://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/immigration.htm If you want to know where I'm coming from, his essay sums it up extremely well. I do not advocate open borders worldwide. What other nations do is their own doing. I see the USA as an island of Liberty in a sea of everything else. It matters not, for example, if Mexico allows free immigration. It matters if we insist on being better and right and lead by example. If we believe in human rights, more so than other nations, then let's give people human rights. In this case, the right to immigrate. After considering the cases made by opponents of open borders, I am just not convinced. Heumer addresses the economic argument about immigrants hurting civilians' job quality and opportunity: In popular discourse, the most common sort of argument for limiting or eliminating immigration is economic. It is said that immigrants take jobs away from American workers, and that they cause a lowering of wage rates due to their willingness to work for lower wages than American workers. At the same time, economists are nearly unanimous in agreeing that the overall economic effects of immigration on existing Americans are positive. These claims are mutually consistent: there are certain industries in which immigrants are disproportionately likely to work. Preexisting workers in those industries are made worse off due to competition with immigrant workers. According to one estimate, immigration during the 1980’s may have reduced the wages of native-born workers in the most strongly affected industries by about 1-2% (5% for high school dropouts). At the same time, employers in those industries and customers of their businesses are made better off due to lower production costs, and the economic gains to these latter groups outweigh the economic losses to the workers. Some economists have accused immigration opponents of overlooking the economic benefits of immigration due to a bias against foreigners or members of other races.
1.1% even if you could directly attribute that to minimum wage seems like a small price to pay for a 23% increase in wages over the national average. We have 150,000 minmum wage earners. So if you chalk up the 1.1% to minimum wage, that means 1,500 people in Oregon will be put out of work due to the min wage laws. But the $1.7 more they are making per hour results in 530 million extra into the hands of workers. That money goes back into our economy. For a frame of reference, that's over $350,000 per person put out of work.
Again, nice try. You can pull your barfo routine of nit picking every word and distorting its meaning, but it won't work with me. You and I disagree. You think I'm wrong, and I think you're equally as wrong. Neither you nor I will ever convince one another on this point. But you can have the last word so you can be the big winner.
The business owners. With there being such a huge wealth disparity in our nation, I think they can afford it. And the idea that the cost of the increased wages will be passed onto the consumer is not necessarily true either. If Burger King is selling a whopper for $2.99, they've set it at a price they think will maximize revenue. If they believed they could sell just as many for $3.50, they'd be selling them for $3.50. Point being, the product is being sold in the same competitive marketplace.
And the minimum wage affects everyone equally, not just one business. A market will not just continue to decrease prices; they'll be forced to raise prices along with everyone else. Consider the fast food chains with the increase in the price of beef. They haven't been holding prices steady; they've been increasing, no matter which chain it is.
After decades of a Republican brick wall at the Federal level, Democrats are progressing at the municipal level. First Seattle, then other cities, now even Los Angeles. http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-broad-caruso-wage-20140302,0,5239368.story#axzz2umvisatv
LOL. A large percentage of Oregonians who only earn minimum wage are already homeless, and have been for several years. Many of them used to actually own homes. I know a woman older than I am who commutes to her 2 minimum wage jobs in Bend from a tepee 30 miles East of town where she lives with her husband who is disabled with heart disease. But hey, as long as a few hundred billionaires with no moral compass or conscience can lead fairytale lives I'm sure she feels the effort is worth it.
