Summary: Even though the national labor market is becoming stronger overall, immigrants haven't been seeing the benefits and likely won't for awhile. One of these reasons is that many large corporations have been raising their minimum wages, offering certain benefits and wages that immigrant-run businesses are often unable to pay their employees. Therefore, businesses run by immigrants have been seeing an exodus to these corporate giants, and it's difficult for them to find new employees who have the specialized skills they need, like being fluent in another language or able to expertly cook foreign foods. Immigrants will also likely start to see their neighborhoods being taken over by growing businesses, as these neighborhoods are typically built on cheaper land in urban areas and have lower voting rates that will restrict them from voting against their land being taken.
Questions:
1. Is there a way to help out immigrants and their businesses from being hit hard as our economy grows? Should the government be involved, or is the situation better left alone?
2. Considering we live in the Bay Area, where many immigrants reside, do you have any personal experiences similar to this situation? How do you think immigrants are affected in immigrant-rich communities like San Mateo compared to other regions of the country?
Link: Bloomberg
1 comment:
Is this article suggesting that in a weak economy immigrants would do better? It seems it assumes that all immigrants are small business owners, and that small businesses see no upside from a strong labor market.
Even if we assume that more customers won't offset employees asking for more wages in any way, the employees that leave the small business looking for higher pay could also be immigrants. In fact, even the heads of the big business could be immigrants themselves (see Google).
We have some serious problems in the world, why waste time trying to argue against a good economy.
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