The British government allows Commonwealth citizens a two-year stay as working holiday makers. This is nothing more than a ruse to attract a cheaper workforce, a white one at that–A workforce that is willing to work for little more than the dole. We fulfill a role as many Brits do not consider bartending or waiting on tables real work or worth the trouble.
Australians, South Africans, New Zealanders etc are, however, a separate statistic when it comes to UK employment figures.
Some working holiday makers, as I did, find semi-professional work. Our numbers are too small to make any difference. But this is beside the point.
Imported workers in many industrialized countries contribute more than for which they are given credit. Taiwan, although it may not look it, is a developed nation. Employers here don’t hire foreign workers in place of Taiwanese workers. They hire them because there is a hole in the cheap labor market. These people help to build capital equipment: buildings, etc. This economy would surely stutter if it was not for this valuable resource.
Most wealthy countries import cheap labor, not to their detriment but to their advantage. A few examples:
SEA in Taiwan
Mexicans in the US.
Africans in France.
Saying imported cheap labor affects the local workforce is a traditional redneck fallback.
What is the unemployment rate in Taiwan, 5% or thereabouts-Almost full employment, I’d say.
Now, to get back to the original concern: An organized labor force soon becomes an expensive one. So long as this country needs cheap labor to reduce costs for building capital equipment, for the foreseeable future
“The pool of foreign workers does not diminish” is obvious to anybody. The world’s population is expanding, not contracting. No gold stars for that observation. More important I think is that the pool of foreign workers permitted to work in Taiwan cannot expand … at least for now. If the number of foreign workers here cannot expand, then how can employment among Taiwanese be affected? If the economy takes off again, I see no reason for the government not to raise the caps on imported labor quotes.
I do think the “Beavis and Butthead” types from Tealit have landed and passed immigration. Welcome to Segue.com and have a nice stay!
The British government allows Commonwealth citizens a two-year stay as working holiday makers. This is nothing more than a ruse to attract a cheaper workforce, a white one at that–A workforce that is willing to work for little more than the dole…etc. etc.[/quote]
You make it sound like this is the British imperialists one-sidedly exploiting all those suffering colonials, but I think you will find that these working holiday arrangements are mutual arrangements between the countries concerned, and British people experience the same conditions in those other countries. See the following quote from Working in Australia
[quote]Australia allows citizens of Canada, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Japan, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, South Korea, Sweden and the United Kingdom to work on a temporary basis through the Working Holiday Maker programme.
A Working Holiday Maker visa allows citizens of the above countries aged 18-30 with no dependent children to spend up to one year in Australia taking casual and temporary work to supplement their funds. The programme specifically implies that work is of a casual/part-time or temporary nature and you may not work at one job for longer than three months. However you may work through an employment agency for a longer period as long as the temporary assignments which you are placed in are shorter than three months.[/quote]
By the way, why do you say “a cheaper workforce, a white one at that”? Do you think it is somehow worse to pay white people low wages than people of other skin hues?
I was commenting on the pool of foreign workers in Taiwan (of course you knew that). The number of foreign workers has to shrink as a result of the pay cut in order for your position to be valid. With the above quote (and other coments you’ve posted) you acknowledge the fact that a pay cut to foreign workers will not reduce the number of foreign workers in Taiwan. So, you negate your own claim that there will be more jobs for Taiwanese workers as a result of the pay cuts for foreigners.
I am aware of the government controls that are in place and that this labor segment does not follow standard free market rules. But, those controls can’t completely protect Taiwanese workers from the effects of lower foreign labor costs.
The number of foreign workers in Taiwan is certain to increase as a result of a reduction in their required pay. The only way that would not be true is if all companies that are eligible to hire foreign workers have already used up their quotas and have no way to import more labor. Currently, this is not the case. The effect on Taiwanese employment figures probably won’t be huge, but there will be an increase in unemployment.
This horse is dead. No need to keep beating it.
By the way, what did you end up using to wash the hat down?
"Karma, I don’t NEED no stinking Karma. I already ooze the stuff "
People here seem to forget about all the Taiwan factories that have moved across the Straits and why. The only reason any manufacturing remains in Taiwan is due to foreign workers. If they can’t get the workers here in Taiwan, they’ll simply close shop and move to China.
First, just because someone’s a redneck doesn’t mean they’re wrong.
Second, the reason it’s a fallback is because it’s true. Typically, it is the organized political resistance of the lower-paid segments of society which most resist the importation of foreign laborers, while it’s the wealthy capitalists who most push for it. Imported cheap labor puts natives out of jobs and drives the price-per-hour of their labor downwards. This is simple economics 101, and it really doesn’t matter what monkey or anyone else (the fella i just quoted?) thinks. The self-evident transparency of the facts speak for themselves.
You should have heeded my friendly advice. It was meant to prevent your making yourself look like an obnoxious fool, but apparently you don’t care about that.
The logic is as follows:
Cost for an employer to hire foreign workers goes down.
Employers hire MORE foreign workers and FEWER Taiwanese workers. (The pool of available foreign workers does not diminish.)
Taiwan’s unemployment rate goes up.
Put some ketchup on your hat and get started![/quote]
From the point of view of simple economics, this is plain WRONG. (And take note, too, shr fang tian.)
An influx of foreign workers, paid a lower wage, will force the wages of those Taiwanese competing with them down. It is true. But it is not true that unemployment will rise, except for in the very short term. The level of unemployment in an ecomony is dependent on aggregate demand, which is further dependent largely on the policy stance of the monetary authorities.
Thus, it is true to say that foreign labour may suppress wages but not that unemployment will rise. This is a common fallacy - it assumes that there is a FIXED NUMBER OF JOBS in the economy. There is not.
Archinasia, we are way past hats and ketchup now. I think UNDERPANTS AND BROWN SAUCE may be the order of the day.
So, do you see where you made the mistake shr fang tian?
Cheap labour may drive wages down, but it does not necessarily put people out of jobs. Except for in the very short term, where people are looking for new jobs, the number of jobs and the level of unemployment depends on other factors. Had you really done a course in Economics 101, then you would know this. Or maybe you just did the course and forgot this bit?
And if you are not one of those that likes to rely on theory - perhaps you can look at the experience of the United States - despite a pretty high rate of immigration over many years, unemployment has been at historically low levels. The rise in the unemployment rate over the last year can be attributed to a softening in demand.
Actually, i’ve had graduate- and post-graduate instruction in Economics, so you should watch your step in those conclusions you like to jump towards.
In an economy that’s growing – like that of the U.S. in the last decade or so – what you say has some truth. But only some, and only for the brief period between when the initial “short term” dropoff occurs and the later drop-off in the economy.
Right now – to take an example from the states – the cleaning industries are dominated by mainly foreign laborers in those states where an abundance of foreign labor exists – i.e. – new mexico, texas, florida, california, etc. Even in states where the foreign labor market is not nearly so strongly developed – such as Alabama, or Mississippi – the foreign presence in those industries is still strong.
These people drive the price of labor down to a point where native people refuse the jobs. If one perceives oneself as a cleaning lady, then yes indeed – your job has been “undercut” and “stolen” out from under you by foreign laborers. These days, cleaning ladies and janitorial services have become contracted out to large companies which pay what are essentially below-poverty-level wages – perhaps not the listed poverty leve, but by any practical (i.e. – non-politicized) measure they are certainly classed as “working poor”.
The rise in unemployment can be attributed to the realization that all the money the rich white daddies were pouring into their rich white kiddies’ harebrained schemes was getting lost in jacuzzis, whores, drink and fitness centers. Once that finally happened, the rest of the nation took a step back and realized that a lot of money had suddenly been lost on a ten-year “internet party” and started to pull in its belts.
And as usual, the people who had nothing to do with it whatsoever – the poor, the working-class folks who never saw a penney of any of that money – lose their jobs.
Now, i’ll give you one guess as to which choice an employer at, say, a pig-farm these days will make: a white pig-farmer who demands what would be the equivalent of 7$/hr in wages, or a mexican migrant pig-farmer who demands only 3.50$ in wages.
Whether you like it or not, there are only so many pigs that americans can eat. The numbers of those jobs are, indeed, finite.
You try to mealy-mouth your way out of it by saying its dependent on growth. But…
because Taiwan - over the last decade or so - has been growing at a rate consistently faster than the US, you DOUBLY CONCEDE my point.
This makes no sense! What causes the later “drop-off.” What you are saying is that an influx of foreign labour disturbs the equilibrium(1) of the economy in the short-term, then the economy regains equilibrium(2), and then falls out of equilibrium again. What mechanism causes this? How does the initial influx later disturb equilibrium(2)? Huh? And if it does not cause the later drop off, then you cannot say that foreign labour causes unemployment in anything but the very short term - as displaced workers look for new jobs.
“Refuse jobs!” Yes. So, what you are saying is that foreign workers do the jobs that locals refuse to do - they move on to better jobs. This is precisely the pattern we see in developed countries.
(Take a look at Hongkong and the large number of immigrant workers working in precisely the industries you cited. The local population, by and large, goes onto other jobs. Unemployment did not start to rise in Hongkong until after the Asian crisis and the devaluation of regional currencies meant that HK’s currnecy, pegged to a strong dollar, caused an excessively tight monetary policy. A MONETARY INFLUENCE!!!)
Of course this is your perception, but is does not mean that unemployment is created in the economy as a whole. The reason? You have a choice - to work as a cleaning lady at the reduced wage or to move to other employment.
OK, so something akin to an Austrian theory of the trade cycle - and actually a theory with which I am quite familiar. As a description of what went wrong with the boom, I think its pretty good. However, it has problems accounting for the length of the recession and fall-off in demand after the boom… nevertheless, that’s a different debate entirely.
This is in complete contradiction to your claim that foreign workers cause poverty! Ask the poor if they have enough pig to eat. I am sure they would say they could stand another mouthful. So, your assertion above is surely WRONG. And even if there is a natural limit to human consumption of pork (the size of your stomach) - the United States has not reached that limit, yet. Basing your economics on the assumption that all “pork wants” are satisfied is unlikely to lead to clear-thinking policies to help the poor!
To quote you from another forum:
“Duh!”
And, because the pig industry does indeed have room to grow, this conclusion is false.
But let’s imagine that all desires for pork are completely satisfied. That does not mean that all desires are satisfied. And so, there will still be room for profitable employment in other industries. So, the number of jobs in the entire economy is not finite.
You have extrapolated the effect on one industry to the whole economy. The fallacy of composition! One of the first things an economics course teaches you NOT TO DO!!!
So, how come you are so bad at it?
I could quote dozens of economics texts and articles that have been written over the centuries (yes, centuries) to lay to rest the common fallacies that you are guilty of repeating. The science of economics was developed precisely to refute such nonesense.
shr fang tian, you are an embarrassment to your teachers.
No. I qualify it, saying that your statement is so broad as to be invalid, and explain why.
Unemployment skyrocketed (relatively speaking) after the Asian financial crisis. Which in fact “DOUBLY NEGATES” your point. While it’s holding steady for the moment, this is, from a historical perspective, only the beginning. What you – and all the other “neo-liberal” breed of armchair-economists (which, whether you know it or not, is what you are) – nelect to address is the effect of class and the psychological and cultural effects this has on people.
The basic problem here is that you cannot distinguish between economic theory and fact. On these boards here you are simply regurgitating a theory about how the world works, without providing any empirical evidence to back it up. Moreover, if you did provide the evidence, i can predict now that it would be based upon standards and measurements which are the product almost wholly of neo-liberal theory.
I, on the other hand, prefer descriptive economics, particularly in those cases where it is used to analyze the relationship between institutions and individuals. That’s called “institutional economics”, and yes – the conclusions it comes to about how the world works are quite different than the ones you were taught in your second-tier public university education, and certainly different than you’ll ever be reading in the NYTimes or Wall Street Journal.
The vast majority of Taiwanese people have, for the last thirty or forty years, been making money hand-over-fist. For a long while there it looked to most Taiwanese that the “American Miracle” had arrived and all of society would perpetually exist in this full-employment social network that would, through primarily private means, provide for all.
That has changed in the last few years. The gap between the Taiwanese rich and poor is getting steadily wider – ten years ago it was among the lowest in the world, but in the last five years it has been growing remarkably. This is in large part the consequence of your mythical “foreign labor doesn’t affect jobs” – what once was a closed-system has now been opened up and, as a result, the cheaper labor from outside is, relatively, pushing down – not up – the standard of living for the average Taiwanese laborer.
As factory and industry jobs move off the island, those laborers typically move into service-sector jobs – McDonals, 7-11, janitorial services, security guard services, etc. During the Reagan/Bush era, security services were among the most rapidly expanding industries in the United States.
That fact does not bode well for the argument that the quality of living went up for your average laborer; in fact, it suggests quite the opposite. Unfortunately, neo-liberal economists like yourself do not take such information into account when constructing your theories. Moreover, neo-liberal economists are typically educated with money donated by Wall Street and the public media. The reason is simple: if one wants a lucrative job as an Economist, then studying Institutional Economics isn’t what one will pick. Consequently, since most economists have studied Neo-liberal theories, the weight of public opinion favors their explanations.
But there are other explanations, and many are more valid and accurate than the popular hysteria will admit.
Thus, we arrive at this point – where you’re simply pissing in the wind while the rest of us, who live in reality and deal with poor people every day, try to politely explain to you that you just don’t know what you’re talking about.
Recession. Depression. A failure of the markets. Etc.
Even in the neo-liberal models you claim to understand so well, it’s common knowledge that no economy exists in a state of equilibrium, but instead fluctuates back and forth.
Nonsense. Most laborers vary their jobs among several fields throughout their working life. After finding it difficult to get work in one field, they switch to another. During growth periods, for instance, it’s much easier for a laborer to get work as a construction worker, but during periods of recession (like now) that becomes much more difficult. Typically, there are fall-back trades – like janitorial and security services – to which these people resort.
When the recession does finally begin (as in now), those workers turn to their fall-back jobs and discover that they no longer can rely upon those means of income – whereas their historical position, typically fulfilled by youths with fewer responsibilities, once served to carry them through the tough times, now it has been “taken” by a foreigner. Moreover, whereas it was formerly possible to utilize such work to carry over their families in tough times, now the market for their labors provides fewer benefits because of the cheap price for which the foreign labor force will perform.
Simple mechanisms, easily verified. Just go around and find a few construction workers around the island, and ask them about how well they’ve been doing recently.
Like most neo-liberals, you have an idealized vision of how the labor-classes make their living – and it has little or nothing to do with the reality of their situation.
Here you are, saying that i am right. Odd that you couldn’t figure it out above when you demanded that i explain it to you; is that from an intellectual malaise, or just simple carelessness?
Furthermore, the Hong Kong situation is in no way analagous to the situation faced by Taiwanese or American laborers, who are utterly confined within a heterogenous system from which they cannot escape. Hong Kongers have a constant influx of wealthy patrons who can afford to purchase services for which there is no end of demand, as well as the opportunities to go off to the mainland and become involved in ventures ranging from low-level all the way up to management posts.
Those opportunities simply don’t exist in the States.
An “excessively tight monetary policy” is meaningless until you can put it into tangible, street-level terms that make sense to y’r average boss. Regardless, what it basically means is that people suffered, and of course the vast majority of those people were the poor and laboring classes.
Hong Kong has one of the lowest quality of living indices for its poor classes. Haven’t you ever wondered why the triads are such a significant and troublesome part of their culture? Sure, they may be “employed” – at a factory which doesn’t really produce anything except heroin, or hosts private parties for wealthy patrons with women and gambling; or makes loans to the local middle class at exorbitant interest rates; or extorts protection money from the local businesses –
– or keeps the foreigners in their places.
Your explanations are just political propaganda used to justify the economic excesses which characterize the “Western Liberalization” movements. Generally speaking, wherever there starts a big influx of foreign labor the quality of life for the lower third of the population relative to the rest of the nation starts into steep decline. You can suggest all you want that the benefits of “perpetual growth” always make up for the decline in technological and social advances by “trickling down” from the developments lavished on the wealthy, but basically you’re just engaging in “voodoo economics” –
and, finally, i’ll explain it again: not only do i know enough economics to hold my own, but you yourself should be a little bit more careful before jumping off of those precipitous conclusions you like to massage your ego with.
Interesting how you don’t mention the 3-5% chronically unemployed in the States, most of whom wind up in prison for crimes like selling pot and so are not counted in the unemployment indices used by – you guessed it – neo-liberal economists. Or the vast number of working poor in the States, who are now working 40-50 hour workweeks often with no means of paying their rent, accumulating savings, taking sick-leave or vacations, or getting post-secondary education to improve their station. Estimates now are that this class of people may be as high as 10-15% of the U.S. population.
And, incidentally – most of them are in jobs which are dominated by foreign labor.
In any economy the determining issue is not how much people want to eat, but how much they can afford to buy.
There is no contradiction in my claim. Simply put, over any given period there are a finite amount of jobs available in any given industry. If all jobs are filled, then the result is unemployment.
Unemployment exists in all economies. Ergo, there is not an infinite availability of adequate jobs.
My assertion stands.
Again – in the system upon which you are basing your conclusions, the point is not how much people want but how much they can pay for – and yes, there is a limit to that.
Huge parts of South America are starving; that hasn’t created any great boom in the U.S. pork industry. Why?
Obviously – because they can’t pay for it.
No; i have used as an example a practical situation faced by many people, and used that to explain why the idealized “market” of which you speak doesn’t exist. The theory that because the economy is constantly growing –
but again, just like our current debate that’s another Economic issue which one cannot take for granted, and against which i have many easy arguments –
that jobs are constantly growing fails to account for the discrepancy between the idealized term “economic growth” when used as a technical economics term and the reality of what “growth” actually means for most people.
Most folks in the U.S. are working longer hours for less pay and less time at home than they have at any time over the last thirty years, within fractured communities which are largely uninhabited except when folks come home to watch t.v. before they pass off to sleep.
Ask most folks if that’s “growth” and they’ll laugh in your face.
Or, from another angle: someone may have an available job, but it means his youngest child won’t be able to eat, or go to the hospital, or some other such basic sacrifice. Simply arguing that there’s an “infinite availability of jobs” is, in any practical understanding, absolutely meaningless.
And we really should take this to a different thread. This isn’t the place for this discussion.
I am assuming, for convenience, that shr fang tian is a he. Sorry, if I am mistaken. For the sake of the world, I would far rather believe he was some misguided piece of space debris, but anyway…(sigh) here goes.
The contortions in shr fang tian’s position are so severe we need to recap the argument.
SFT maintains immigration lowers wages and causes unemployment.
I maintain that it lowers wages in one sector but that the effect on unemployment is short-term only, as the TOTAL number of jobs depends on aggregate demand and is therefore (largely) governed by monetary factors.
SFT then agreed I was right in the case of a growing economy, but then only in the medium term as immigration causes short-term unemployment, then is absorbed and then by some mechanism causes unemployment in the long term.
There was a lot in his post that, for reasons of (OK, relative) brevity I will not answer. First, anything about economics methodology was pure ego. Second, anything about poverty and wage differentials, I will also ignore. So, I will not respond to great trawls of verbiage such as that starting:
or his stuff about McDonalds and 7-11, because that is not the argument.
Remember – the disagreement is on whether immigration causes unemployment, not whether it lowers wages. That’s where we were. Now, let’s look at what he has said:
No, SFT, that is my point – the Asian Financial Crisis was a… financial crisis. If you believe it was caused by immigration, you must show how. And at any rate, it would have been called the Asian Immigration Crisis.
I had previously held up the examples of the US and Hong Kong as two countries with high levels of immigration and immigrant workers that had nevertheless maintained full employment. That full employment only being later broken by recession. In the case of the US, even SFT did not blame the recession on immigration, but on a “rich daddy” theory of economic fluctuations. Again, an admission that unemployment is caused by factors other than immigration.
Remember that SFT had to concede my point at the outset but then had this mealy-mouthed way of trying to get out of it? He brewed up this funny explanation that immigration causes unemployment in the short-term, then is absorbed, and then causes a subsequent “drop-off.” I challenged him as to how immigration had this complex effect:
His reply?
So, not immigration then!!!
We have now narrowed his thesis that immigration causes unemployment down to a very limited set of circumstances. Let me recap. By his own admission:
It holds in the short-term but not the medium term or long-term
It holds only in an economy that is not growing
So, SFT then had to use a fall-back argument:
But do you see what he is doing? He is now saying that immigration causes unemployment only in the short term and only in periods of recession!!! (And do you think he would be as upset if the worker returned to his “fall-back” job and found that it had been taken by… a Taiwanese?)
But its worse than that. Think for a second, logically, about the implications of the idea of “fall-back” jobs.
The point is that Taiwanese have moved on to do other jobs. They no longer want to do their “fall back” jobs. So, in the good times, they do their, let’s call it, “preferred” job. But if no Taiwanese wants to do the “fall-back” jobs, who will do them? Eh? That’s right, foreign labour. “Come on in,” they say, “and do these jobs that we are not prepared to do.” But when recession hits, all of a sudden it’s: “Hey, that’s my fall-back job. What right do you have to steal it?”
So, SFT, you claim to care about the poor. Why such a callous disregard for the foreign labour you hire to do your “fall-back” jobs while times are too good for you to get your hands dirty?
Can you see? An economy ticking along quite happily. Taiwanese in their “preferred” jobs. Foreigners in the lower-paying “fall back” jobs. Along comes a recession (which contrary to his protestations in other parts of his above post) seems to particularly hit the better-paying “preferred” jobs but leave the low-paid “fall back jobs” intact. Taiwanese then, finding they cannot do their preferred jobs, find that they want to return to their old “fall back” job. But of course, they see that foreigners have got them.
So, SFT is saying it is fair to shift the impact of a (for example, monetary-shock induced) recession from the relatively better paid Taiwanese to the relatively worse paid “fall-back” workers, simply because the latter are foreign immigrants.
DISGUSTING. HATEFUL.
And as a way to conduct macroeconomic policy, its moronic. Multiple choice question for you punters out there:
When the US suffers a fall in demand, does it respond by:
a) Reducing the supply of labour by kicking out poor foreigners
b) Stimulating aggregate demand by lowering interest rates and/or increasing Government spending
All those who answered a) can join SFT in the “special” class.
And now, this is how the labour market could work. Though SFT seems to think it negates my point, it actually is my whole point:
[quote=“shr fang tian”] Quote:
Take a look at Hongkong and the large number of immigrant workers working in precisely the industries you cited. The local population, by and large, goes onto other jobs. Unemployment did not start to rise in Hongkong until after the Asian crisis and the devaluation of regional currencies meant that HK’s currency, pegged to a strong dollar, caused an excessively tight monetary policy. A MONETARY INFLUENCE!!!)
Here you are, saying that i am right. Odd that you couldn’t figure it out above when you demanded that i explain it to you; is that from an intellectual malaise, or just simple carelessness? [/quote]
Let me explain for SFT very, very slowly.
Hongkong has lived with high levels of immigration for most of its history.
It has never been a cause of high unemployment in the territory
Those displaced by immigrant workers get other jobs
Only when monetary factors hit HK in the aftermath of the Asian Financial crisis did unemployment rise
Thus, it seems obvious from this real-world example that unemployment depends on aggregate demand (where monetary factors are very important) and not on immigration.
So, case proved as far as I am concerned.
Finally, a couple of technical points, which show that he is a bit amateurish.
We did have the obligatory “I am an economist and I know what I am talking about”:
Which was really, really funny, when he followed it up with:
Which is MY point that the level of employment depends ultimately on the level of aggregate demand!!!
We then had another go at the classic mistake people with insufficient economics knowledge make – the fallacy of composition. This means that you cannot assume that what happens in one industry happens to the economy as a whole. Blithely, he repeats:
Appalling stuff SFT – read up on the fallacy of composition, please.
Finally, perhaps realising his morally repugnant position, he tried to make this argument look like a simple technical dispute:
No.
I think it is appropriate here and I will tell you why.
It annoys me when people like SFT use half-baked, tawdry sophistry to try and peddle the old argument: “them foreigners is coming over here nickin’ our jobs!” It is precisely this kind of narrow-minded, inhuman attitude that the human rights forum should expose.
The contortions and backtracking that SFT has had to go through are amply on display here. It should serve as a reminder that there is no good argument against immigration. It also has a bearing on the kind of country Taiwan wants to be. It is my experience that those countries that have embraced immigration have been among the richest, fastest growing, most vibrant places to live. Those that have closed themselves off have, in turn, been inward looking and narrow-minded. I am not saying here that immigration raises growth rates/wealth (though some economists make exactly this claim) but I am saying that immigration does not cause unemployment. And it is a travesty that SFT should claim to be an economist and then try and ply the very sort of argument economic science has spent centuries refuting.
And let me tell you what I find most unpleasant about his post. He tries to come over as caring for the poor. He has a lot to say about how wage differentials have risen and the poor are stuck in miserable jobs. And yet, he has no concern for the immigrant workers, does he? They have come from far worse situations – why else would they accept wages that are lower than average here?
So, what his argument really boils down to is – “I want poor foreigners to come here and do jobs that we are not prepared to do on a sustained basis. But in times of recession, I want to kick them back out, so the locals can have their “fall-back” jobs back for a little while, before the economy picks up again. Then the foreigners can come back.”
It really is the most disgusting kind of two-faced bigotry. Pretending to care about poverty – but when it all comes down to it, its about the colour of skin. SFT needs to wake up and accept what it means to be a cosmopolitan society.
[quote=“shr fang tian”]Let me spell it out for you:
There is no big drop-off in the short-term period after foreign laborers are admitted into any certain market; they fill a short-term need, but then once a recession/depression/failure of the markets occur their presence creates a surplus demand for labor that consequently makes life generally much less pleasant for native-laborers, not to mention making it much harder for them to find a job.
i’m not going to respond to any more of this crap.[/quote]
You see, if you hound someone’s argument down to the death, you will eventually get at what they believe.
After reading SFT’s comment above, we now understand the meaning of his claim that immigration causes unemployment.
What he is actually saying is something different. Let’s break the quote above down.
So, immigration does not cause unemployment, now, even in the short term. We must assume that at this point, the economy is therefore pretty fully employed as it has to import labour.
A recession comes along and causes unemployment. The cause? A market failure. OK. That could be anything. But you see - no longer does he make the claim that immigration causes unemployment.
And at this point, the argument is won, because SFT has completely retreated from the claim that immigration causes unemployment.
He does however, have one more miserable claim up his sleeve. Once the recession has caused unemployment:
Note, first of all that our economics guru’s statement makes no sense. How can the presence of extra workers create surplus demand for labour? Well, I suppose if some immigrants are not just workers but are employers, then the demand for labour will rise. But if there is a surplus demand for labour, surely it would be easy for anyone to get a job? And there would be upward pressure on wages! We would be importing more labour!!! He may have some theoretical trickery up his sleeve, but I am sure he simply is trying to use economic jargon without understanding the concepts.
Let’s assume he really means to say that they (immigrant workers) create an oversupply of labour.
But here is where SFT reveals that he has no shed of humanity or conception of a cosmopolitan society.
Why pick on the foreign workers? They did not cause unemployment! Not even… as SFT now admits, not even in the short term! So, when a recession comes along (caused by an unspecified market failure) he believes it is the foreigners to blame!!!
Wow!!!
In SFT’s world, if you are a foreigner working in Taiwan, no matter what your job, you do not have a legitimate stake in this economy. As for the unemployment that accompanies a recession, though he no longer thinks you caused it, he nevertheless believes you should shoulder the full impact of the recession and give up your job to a local. Basically, he wants to treat foreign workers as the part-time slaves of the locals.
There you have it ladies and gentlemen - as clear as day.
Xenophobia, bigotry, and intolerance… all wrapped up in a veneer of care for the poor and delivered by sophistry born of a bastardisation of economics jargon and a woefully inadequate grasp of theory.
Of course, he had his parting shot:
Which to me suggested he was getting tired of his own position. If he has truly come to see the logical inconsistencies and moral outrages perpetrated by his line of thought, then there may be hope for him yet!!!
I wish him good luck.
But in truth it was a pathetic display. If this is an example of Taiwan’s postgraduates, this country has a lot of growing up to do. I hope for the sake of Taiwan’s human rights and its development as a cosmopolitan society, SFT is neither local, vocal, nor in the majority.
Let’s end on an optimistic note. In my experience, the vast majority of Taiwanese people, most of whom have less education than SFT professes to have, exhibit a much more broad-minded and intelligent view of Taiwan’s future.
