The new head of the U.N.'s migration agency said Monday that the private sector is “desperate” for their countries to take in migrants to mop up labor shortages, especially in the West — endeavoring to steer a narrative away from reticence and suspicion about migrants in many parts of the world.
Amy Pope, the first woman to head the International Organization for Migration, sought to play up the economic benefits of migration for rich nations with aging populations and declining workforces — in the face of “build-the-wall” rhetoric in the United States to block migrants from Latin America and right-wing movements in Europe that want to keep foreigners out.
”We hear from … the private sector globally, but especially in Europe and in North America, that they are desperate for migration in order to meet their own labor market needs and in order to continue to fuel innovation within their own companies,” Pope, who is American, told reporters.
She said the evidence was “fairly overwhelming” that migration benefits economies by filling jobs, powering innovation or “fueling the renovation or revitalization of aging communities.”
There are ten people.
There are eleven jobs.
There is a labor shortage.
Companies have to raise wages, and industries that aren’t productive in terms of their use of human capital are driven out of the market (aka: why it’s so common to use illegal immigrants for farming jobs in the southeast).
As a result of higher wages, investing in human productivity becomes more profitable and someone finds out how to automate one of the jobs.
There are eight jobs.
There are ten people.
This cycle is why Western productivity has plummeted. We started trade with china. Why invest in productivity when you can vacuum up a bunch of farmers and just have 10 more cheap workers doing the job?
Those times are gone now.
It’s all connected, and at it’s core is the fact that COVID shocked the market, created lots of labor demand and also booted lots of boomers. You can’t just fix it by just raising wages. Places will go out of business. We will have to change our way of life.
You already see it. Walmart and the likes aren’t open 24/7. Fast food is getting more and more expensive (it’s just not a sustainable use of human life anymore). These are all good changes, but it’s still all due a labor shortage.
You seem to be ignoring where profits are going - shareholders have, for decades, taken far more than their fair share of things and wages absolutely can go up without driving companies out of business it’s just that one group has to take less and that’s the shareholders. Employers will continue to do anything in their power to keep shareholders happy over employees and that absolutely includes bringing in cheaper, migrant labor. It’s not a labor shortage, it’s a wage shortage and investing in productivity doesn’t reduce jobs, it creates new ones - often that require a different skill set than the one it replaced and that’s one reason we are failing, we aren’t helping people acquire new skills en mass