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<p>Immigration itself is a selection filter. One usually has to be pretty motivated to pick up and move to another country. Also, the categories of legal immigration impose additional selection in favor of such characteristics among immigrants.</p>
<p>Motivated or desperate. In the case of illegal immigrants from certain countries, they feel that they have absolutely no choice because their countries want their remittances, not their persons.</p>
<p>There are too many people chasing too few jobs. Degree credentialism winnows the pool to a manageable number. Arbitrary cutoffs are increasingly becoming the norm. Talented people are overlooked, but it doesn’t matter because there are just so many applicants that employers don’t need to worry about surveying the whole field. It’s too time consuming and not worth the effort for them. In addition, laws against discrimination in hiring are strict. That means that the person with the best qualifications on paper is the most risk-free hire, if you don’t want to get sued by a disgruntled rejected applicant. This is especially true if you are a college taking federal money, which requires you to follow Affirmative Action guidelines scrupulously.</p>
<p>There is worldwide downward pressure on wages and salaries at all levels because of technological unemployment and globalization. We are seeing a great leveling. Americans lived in a dream world post WWII with little competition. That’s not the case anymore.</p>
<p>Note that capital is more mobile than labor these days. Outsourcing jobs is not unexpected under these circumstances.</p>
<p>The consumers who will give the companies the market are less mobile. We should captitalize the sheer size of our market and take advantage of it to benefit our people.</p>
<p>An example on the local level is that, if a business earns money from a community, they should feed back to the community, instead of making money here and then “sheltering” the earned money in some tax heaven countries and only pass the money to their children.</p>
<p>We have a similar frustration in our office without the immigration issue. All employees must have a degree. As a result, we can’t keep a receptionist-- our last one had a masters degree, of course she didn’t stay! We’ve been trying to replace her since July and other employees who do skilled work have to take time away from their jobs to cover the front desk every day instead.</p>
<p>And in our case, it is definitely not too many people competing for too few jobs. On any given day we have 5+ entry level positions we can’t fill. We’ve been short staffed for over a year now. We get applicants, but not a ton, and they’re not great regardless of education level. My department has a pretty low success rate with new hires, for that matter, too. I wonder if it’s just that these days people will take any job they can get even if they have no intention of trying to stick it out there.</p>
<p>Ema, I’m not going to lie, that’s what my fiance did. When we moved back to where you and I are from, I told him he needed a job and to take whatever was offered. I mean, he’s working alongside high schoolers, it’s not a decent job like a receptionist, so it’s a bit different but a lot of people are just taking jobs out of necessity.</p>
<p>Part of if is benefits and wages. Many people are hired as temp emergency hires and get NI benefits, so have to move to positions where they can get benefits when such positions become available. Part of it in our state is the wages are often tok low to be competitive with benefits that are obtained by NOT working. Lots of issues.</p>
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<p>My son is part of local flagship math program for talented youth. Essentially students take math of the U, instead of from their high school during the year. </p>
<p>One summer they had a special program for members of that program. It was not expensive and it was only one week. None of the kids wanted to do a summer program. The program organizers had to send email to the parents regarding availability of the summer program, because none of the 200 or so kids gave the hand out to the parents.</p>
<p>After the first day my son commented that he was the only Caucasian kid there. Everyone else was Asian. </p>
<p>The thing is, that the ethnicity of the kids did not matter. Everyone who attended the summer program was the kid of an immigrant, including my son. Every kid was forced to participate in that optional program by their parents. </p>
<p>The kids of American parents stayed home, because their parents let them.</p>
<p>Romani, it’s what I did, too. I just ended up liking my job after all and I stayed put, but I applied for anything and everything when I graduated. I think I am one of the only people from my “class” left after 2 years. There don’t appear to be a lot of new grads interested in insurance, we just don’t get enough applicants and the ones we hire don’t stay in the industry more than a year or two.</p>
<p>Not sure if we have the same problem with experienced hires as I am only familiar with my peer group in the company. I only just recently got promoted out of the “entry level” myself.</p>
<p>P.S. If your fiance has a degree and is okay with doing insurance, send his resume my way! ;)</p>
<p>“And of course, having someone who is multi-lingual answering the phone in an urban juco could be of value.”</p>
<p>Bingo. One of the biggest employers in San Francisco is UCSF. During my unemployment, I applied to a number of non-science jobs there, but I was at a disadvantage: pretty much all of the administrative positions required language ability with Russian, Cantonese, or Spanish - hence, immigrants.</p>
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Why should employees be loyal to their employers when employers clearly have no loyalty to their employees? Should an employee “stick it out” out of the goodness of their heart?</p>
<p>If the company is only paying that receptionist (wild guess) $35,000 a year… well, yeah, that’s not a terrible salary but neither is it very good, either. It’s entry-level pay for a person with education, and someone who gains experience at that job is likely able to compete for a better-paying position after a relatively short period of time. If there’s no pension plan, no longevity pay, no step increases… then yeah, why would that employee stick around?</p>
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So there is no supply at the wages the positions offer. The obvious solution is to increase the salary until they are attractive enough to be filled.</p>
<p>I’m a public servant with the federal government, working as a public affairs professional with the U.S. Forest Service. It’s a job that’s not my dream job, but I’m well-qualified, the starting salary is fair, I get a two-grade career-ladder promotion after the first year and step increases annually for the following three years. Beyond that, I have an opportunity to compete internally for promotions or transfers within the agency and the rest of the government. Plus there’s a pension plan to vest in. Am I willing to “stick it out” and work hard in this position for a few years before looking at transferring to a different job? You bet.</p>
<p>Pay an employee decent wages and offer incentives for staying around, and they might do that.</p>
<p>Polarscribe, I’m not saying I agree with my company’s strategy, I said I found it frustrating. </p>
<p>I don’t blame the applicants for not flocking, I just don’t get it. I’m told new grads are desperate for proper employment and I sure was when I graduated but that is so not what I am seeing at all. At the receptionist level I get it because we want a degree, but here that is sub-entry level. It’s reasonable to expect a degree for our true entry level but the qualified applicants are not there. We get jokers who come in and yell at their interviewer. The starting salary is not great but is competitive for the position, and mine rose by 35% within the first two years. My point about not getting applicants was that for us, it isn’t that we are setting the bar so high just because we have too many applicants and need to narrow it down-- we have hardly any quality applicants for actual skilled positions where our expectations are not unreasonable. So why set the bar so high for the freaking receptionist!?</p>
<p>I didn’t mean people are doing anything wrong by using one job as a stepping stone for the other, as I said I planned to do the same thing. I was just musing about why I can’t get a full staff to save my life if supposedly the world is swarming with qualified applicants who are desperate for work. My only guess is that most young people just aren’t interested in this industry and if they will come here at all it is only to get somewhere else. Most of my friends that have left took lower paying jobs in different industries just to get into that other industry instead.</p>
<p>We had a discussion about this at Thanksgiving. In 1980, we had a minimum wage but it really only applied to a few positions reserved for teens. Anyone with a HS diploma could walk into a factory, fill out an application, and get a job paying roughly 3x the minimum wage. These jobs were full time, had health and retirement benefits, and potential to move to lead or supervisory positions.</p>
<p>Professional jobs for someone with a HS diploma might pay 5x minimum wage. This was enough to buy a decent house and send the kids to swim lessons and private universities. Wage compression in our new economy, even among professionals, has pushed more middle-middle class people toward the bottom of the middle class and upper-middle class toward the middle-middle. </p>
<p>At our factory, if you have family health insurance a production job pays lower than minimum wage. Front office pays about 2x and engineering about 4x. Boeing, with its duopoly in the large aircraft market and steady income from the defense sector, is one of the last holdouts.</p>
<p>When I was in the financial industry, we considered it a sign of impending doom when they devalued the contributing employees and artificially inflated profit margins. We seem to be doing that on a grand scale these days.</p>
<p>People with degrees, rightly, aspire to positions that are appropriate to their fields and credentials, so they won’t stay in jobs that don’t give that professional satisfaction and personal sense of appropriateness. People without degrees often want stability and would stay at a position that offered decent salary, working environment and stability. Unfortunately, people without a degree often can’t get interviews for such jobs even if they have years of experience doing the same job satisfactorily elsewhere.</p>
<p>Emaheevul, I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that you had any control over those policies :)</p>
<p>The immigration question and the degree question are separate issues. Presuming that immigrants have the exact same right to work as citizens in this case, then that factor is irrelevant; the person with more education would probably be hired.</p>
<p>I do think a lot of people who don’t need degrees feel obligated to pay money for a college just because you almost need one to be competitive these days. That’s not good, but I don’t know what can be done to solve this problem.</p>
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<p>That would be pretty amazing. So were your ancestors all descended from the original settlers of Jamestown? Even the Mayflower was less than 400 years ago. </p>
<p>Based on what I was doing at my internship, they probably could have hired smart high schoolers and trained them. It pays well though. And I would think that someone with only a high school degree might be happy to work for half the pay (which would still be far more than working at McDonalds). That difference in X and Y has got to be pretty big.</p>
<p>My understanding is that a company has to pay 2K/year for every H-1B employee they have, but there’s a limit. If this understanding is correct, it seems silly. Seems like it would make much more sense to make it unlimited and raise that amount to something like 30 or 40K/year. If the foreign candidate is really better than any domestic candidate they can find, they’ll pay it. And it’ll be worth it for the country. And if not, they won’t and they’ll hire a domestic employee, and that’ll be good for the country too.</p>