Your article got me thinking. The poor American worker, hes getting squeezed on both sides. You got information jobs getting squeezed by your friend in India. You have your laborer, carpet cleaner or construction dude getting squeezed from the illegals. What you have in the middle is an American worker in a very bad place. For last five years the American worker has clipped along getting great gains in productivity output (basically working his tail off). At the same time wages are stagnant so thanks to inflation he is making a percentage of what he used to.

What illegals do is they bring a kind of 'globalization' home. Of course its different, the worker lives next door to you and has to use US currency etc, but its similar, its puts a downward pressure on your wage that cant be competed with. Don't know if I am off base here, just seemed like if you can't go up, information jobs, and can't go down 'labor jobs' where do you go? You work your tail off and be happy you have a job is where you go, the average American worker. =) -oh and tap your home equity for the extra cash.

A few points:

- Illegals pay taxes. Sales taxes when they buy stuff, and indirect property taxes when they rent. Also gas taxes if they drive. These are the major sources of local revenue. At their income level, state and federal taxes wouldn't amount to much, but unless their employer keeps them off the books, that is being paid too. If the employer is pocketing all that tax money, I would think he's running a big risk of an audit from the IRS.

- Attempts to chase down employers just lead to explosions of identity theft. If the illegal presents a social security number and driver's license (both stolen, not fake), the employer can look them up in the system and say he's done all that's necessary. I think this is already happening. The government solution is a national identity database, to track the names and home addresses of every legal worker. It would have to have biometric information too, to keep from being stolen. Is this what you want?

- Saying "let the companies pay a decent wage and pass the cost along" implies, "let the middle class pay more for everything -- construction, yard work, meals out." As if the middle class were undertaxed. And as if raising the wages of unskilled workers would decrease the appeal of these jobs to illegals!

And yes, many of these companies would go out of business. You don't really need to have your house cleaned every week, or have your lawn mowed as often, or build such a huge house or go out to eat at a place with waiters. This "screw the business" attitude seems to imply that customers will just pay and pay no matter how much something costs.

- It doesn't make any sense that employers of illegals are making some huge windfall. Once enough companies are doing that, they would compete away the profit margin, and the legals-only companies would go out of business. There are so many illegals in places like southern California, I'd be surprised if that hasn't happened already.

- Americans get a very expensive education at state expense (12 years at $9000 a year!) If they can't compete with semi-literate field workers from Mexico, they are doomed. Putting up walls and hoping the work doesn't leave the country is not a solution. For example, you could kick out all the illegal construction workers, and then see modular housing factories set up across the border, with a constant stream of prefab housing parts being shipped in and assembled on site. Or farther in the future, there are plans for robotic house construction. I can't find the link, but it's a moving scaffold thing that pours foundations and walls under computer control.

In fact, go to https://roboticnation.blogspot.com for lots of interesting articles. The site author is a bit of a flake, but the links are still worth reading.

The same kind of thing can happen with other service jobs. Work is more mobile than we realized, and there's always the threat of automation for the work that isn't. There are robots that will mow your lawn, you know!

I was thinking about the amount of countries in the world and their ever increasing numbers. Ofcourse its' great to have lots of countries from an Olympics point of view but the smaller its' weight the less leverage in negotiations of any kind and hence easier to control and manipulate. This has perhaps happened over the last 60 years as numbers of contries grew and even before that.

Perhaps this is a centennial trend or longer if we look at Europe where German principalities amalgamated, so did the Italian principialities, and a few others during the last century at least until beginning of 1900s'. On the whole we began 1900s with a sort of reversal where colonies became independant and countries broke apart, some by themselves some with help. So far the trend is continuing and for the forseeable future it seems better to be small but to have more representation in local matters.

The whole notion of world bodies is creating an unnatural state where countries have to behave according to made up rules which may not be the best thing to do nor the most natural for internal organic growth and development. Everything is becoming structured in a bureaucratic way globally. The contries that will benefit the most are those which will ignore all if not most of the rules and always act in long run self interest. When everyone is member of the club there might be no point in staying one. Once that first domino falls and countries find out it would be better to not be a member in a structure it will collapse. I am not against rules and structured settlement but just trying to see the natural order of things either the structures evolve or decay. So far I am noticing decay: Trade Depends on Realtions with Washington.

Your thoughts today (entry of Saturday, June 4) on the creative impulse despite the odds against success reminded me of an interesting article in the New York Times I read a while back (requires registration):

Idea Lab: Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?

The gist of the argument is that big success in creative endeavors, provided you possess base-line competence, is essentially random. Nassim Taleb's popular book Fooled by Randomness touches on this idea with respect to the arts, and he expounds on it greatly in this article:

Fooled by Randomness.

Of course, Taleb has now written two best sellers, so maybe he's changed his tune....