i was reading mises’s writing on the west blocking European immigration and seem to the get the idea that immigration restrictions kept american/australian living standards higher than their counterparts.
so putting aside the question of ethics, does immigration make it harder for natives or make everyone better off.
the link is below
There are no natives and immigrants, this is just political speak. People are people.
According to the article, foreign nations were overpopulated as a result of a lack of opportunity caused by government intervention. Therefore, America, with its opportunity, was underpopulated which contributed to a higher standard of living. This higher standard of living was then protected by government by restricting immigration. That is how I read it. The higher standard of living was not the result of restricted immigration but of a free market. Restricted immigration was simply an attempt to protect this prosperity or to monopolize it. If this is the case, one could assume that Mises believed the prosperity of other nations to be a privilege, not a right; that prosperity is a right of all equally, not the privilege of the few.
To begin with, how does one own a job?
“Perhaps Mises’s most bitter assault upon American and Australian immigration barriers came in an article for a Viennese newspaper at the end of 1935.[21] He points out that there are extensive tracts of land which are sparsely settled, notably in the U.S.A. and the British Commonwealth nations. As a result of their relatively scarce population, their productivity, and hence their wage rates, are higher than in Europe.”
One thing surprises me. How can it be that as a result of a relatively scarce population, their productivity is higher? Seems a total non sequitor.
I thought wages are determined by ones productivity, which is determined by the quality of the tools available.
Here’s our friend Wikipedia on productivity:
“labor productivity is typically measured as a ratio of output per labor-hour, an input. Productivity may be conceived of as a metric of the technical or engineering efficiency of production.”
[More on this later, in the Rothbard quote coming up]
"**Mises continues sardonically that the oft-celebrated "‘miracle’ of the high wages in the United States and Australia may be explained simply by the policy of trying to prevent a new immigration."
Yes, this may be so. If the supply of workers is small,they get paid more. But what does Rothbard say about high wages in the USA?
"What the protectionists don t bother to explain is why U.S. wage rates are so much higher than Taiwan. They are not imposed by Providence. Wage rates are high in the U.S. because American employers have bid these rates up. Like all other prices on the market, wage rates are determined by supply and demand, and the increased demand by U.S. employers has bid wages up. What determines this demand? The “marginal productivity” of labor.
The demand for any factor of production, including labor, is constituted by the productivity of that factor, the amount of revenue that the worker, or the pound of cement or acre of land, is expected to bring to the brim. The more productive the factory, the greater the demand by employers, and the higher its price or wage rate. American labor is more costly than Taiwanese because it is far more productive. What makes it productive? To some extent, the comparative qualities of labor, skill, and education. But most of the difference is not due to the personal qualities of the laborers themselves, but to the fact that the American laborer, on the whole, is equipped with more and better capital equipment than his Taiwanese counterparts. The more and better the capital investment per worker, the greater the worker s productivity, and therefore the higher the wage rate.
In short, if the American wage rate is twice that of the Taiwanese, it is because the American laborer is more heavily capitalized, is equipped with more and better tools, and is therefore, on the average, twice as productive. In a sense, I suppose, it is not “fair” for the American worker to make more than the Taiwanese, not because of his personal qualities, but because savers and investors have supplied him with more tools. But a wage rate is determined not just by personal quality but also by relative scarcity, and in the United States the worker is far scarcer compared to capital than he is in Taiwan.
Putting it another way, the fact that American wage rates are on the average twice that of the Taiwanese, does not make the cost of labor in the U.S. twice that of Taiwan. Since U.S. labor is twice as productive, this means that the double wage rate in the U.S. is offset by the double productivity, so that the cost of labor per unit product in the U.S. and Taiwan tends, on the average, to be the same. One of the major protectionist fallacies is to confuse the price of labor (wage rates) with its cost, which also depends on its relative productivity."
Perhaps Mises and Rothbard are talking about different eras.
All in all, that article surprises me.
well i agree that people are people and this immigration issue is just political jargon… does it make it harder for us to get jobs? Probably yes, if you wanted to mow lawns and charged $50 compared to an immigrant that would charge $20 or $30, all else equal, then yes, you would have a harder time getting work because of your competitior but that isn’t ‘stealing’… that is just adjusting to people’s wants and values…
this same arguement can be said about machines… believe it or not, some people oppose machines because they say that they steal jobs… what a lame assumption… lets ban all cars so we can give people jobs as piggy back riders, then we can have enough jobs for everybody…
Also there are immigrants that create their own business. that isnt ‘stealing’ any jobs, in fact, it is creating more jobs…
I would say that government enforced minimum wage, anti-market bailouts, tariffs, max. working hours, anti market trade agreements (NAFTA) etc… are hurting the work force much more than immigrants
Excactly. Machinery and immigrants do the same thing to the economy. To the OP: page 53.
This especially. If American citizens could work for less than minimum wage without having to get paid under the table and risk getting caught, illegal immigrants would have to compete [basically] on skill level only.
Better off depends on where you are in the equation. If you exist in an economy with minimum wage laws undocumented immigration allows labor to be had at closer to actual market value than the inflated value imposed on the market then you lose because you might get stuck in the unemployment line the government planned on anyway but with less pressure on the employers and tax base than they intended. In a free economy more immigration means more supply of labor. Supply goes up prices go down. Standard of living for the one selling their labor goes down. Of course there would be other factors too like prices going down due to the cheaper labor.
Immigrants increase the scarcity of capital goods relative to labor. This means it requires more capital investment to create the same jobs for the local population. Of course if immigrants bring their own capital with them, it’s about even.
Indeed. Perhaps it makes it more difficult in the very short term, but in the long term having all this cheap labor helps everyone. If a car company can have an assembly line worker for $4/hour instead of a union worker for $60/hour, providing the same use to the company, then those savings can be turned into capital accumulation, and lower the cost of production. This in turn creates more opportunities for everyone as costs fall and labor is freed up to do more useful things than simply fastening bolts onto a car.
Now if you refuse to adapt to the changing environment and instead insist that you will only tighten bolts on cars, or make push-pins by hand, or construct horse carriages, then yes, you will have difficulty finding a job. That’s fine with me. I’d prefer to have a computer than a horse carriage 
Absolute height, not relative matters. And wages can tend toward equalizing while living standards rise across the board. Think about it. On one side of the ocean, a relatively small population in a continent just stuffed with natural resources: natural resources that such a small population could not possibly deploy anywhere near to the fullest possible extent. On the other side of the ocean, a continent relatively impoverished with natural resources, utterly packed with teeming humanity. Yes, as long as it stays that way, and as long as there is enough capital investment in the former country, the wages in the former continent would be higher than in the latter continent. But in terms of the world market’s general productivity of goods and services, wouldn’t it make sense for a large number of the latter people to move to the former continent, so that more hands could be deployed to develop all those untapped resources? Yes, wages for certain kinds of labor in the former continent would go down in nominal terms, yet with a much more optimal allocation of manpower, and thus a hugely greater utilization of the resources in the underpopulated continent, living standards in both continents would increase.
Quite. To build on this, it’s a matter of desires or expectations versus reality. People had been getting paid a certain amount for a certain job, so they came to expect that amount. Now immigrants show up who are willing to do the same job for less money, thus driving down the “price” for that job. Of course, this flies in the face of the natives’ expectations. But it’s often easier, psychologically speaking, for a person to try to make reality match his expectations than it is for him to admit, even to himself, that his expectations turned out to be wrong.
Notice that this is just a nationalistic version of the unionists’ argument. Immigrants are the “scabs” here.
i think the fallacy comes from the the perception that workers fill job positions. less workers- more jobs available. essentially mises is wrong- the American “miracle” wages are not the result of population scarcity. Russia only has 180 million people and certain workers like mac technicians are more scarce than in us, but wages for those technicians are not higher.