They Took Our Jobs!

The Economic Effects of Immigration (Illegal and Legal) and the Rise of the Gig Economy

The act of leaving behind one’s home for favorable employment opportunities has become the standard in the modern economy. Immigration is divisive and often troublesome for the countries involved, but the desire to emigrate is a basic factor of economics. Currency is purposefully differentiated across borders, so of course the cost of living, labor opportunities, education, and quality of life are heavily contrasted as well. Global corporatization and central banking created insane wealth gaps between nations and their constituents. Thus, every immigrant is an economic refugee when the monetary system definitively assaults the medium of exchange.

Those who abandon their home country to work the in U.S. are doing so for the same reason that Americans change professions, commute long distances, or pick up their family and move across states. They are pursuing a better financial situation that doesn’t exist where they currently reside. Incentives drive human decision making, and there is no better incentive than a currency that’s less crappy than your own. The mechanics of a global economy create the yearning to work for U.S. dollars instead of Mexican Pesos. How can we blame any individual for leaving behind a horribly run country built on debt and inflation with limited employment opportunities? By emigrating to a western country with the exact same situation, in their eyes, you are cheap.

Any corporation hell bent on driving shareholder value at the expense of running a quality business would be foolish not to replace their expensive employees with silly expectations of healthcare and benefits for a bargain crew of foreign contractors. The truth is that the American consumer economy does not have enough physical bodies to produce enough goods/services for the current levels of consumption. Foreign workers have become a requirement for GDP to rise and corporate profits to expand. The talent pool for specialized labor has been drastically dwindled by the degradation and saturation of bachelor’s degrees, as well as a cultural shift in work ethic. Quite simply, the American worker is no longer worth what they cost.

The greatest irony of U.S. dollar’s world reserve currency status is the necessity for foreign demand. Dollar inflation is exported to other nations because the excess supply printed by our banks is absorbed by foreign governments and immigrants who exchange their lessor currency and make up the needed demand. This is a privilege for Americans to export their currency devaluation, but they pay for it in the job market. It is very difficult to measure the level of economic opportunity taken from domestic workers and given to foreign labor. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics (propaganda) does not have quantifiable data to see how corporations divert full-time domestic labor towards foreign contractors. It’s an obvious trend, but the extent of which is undetermined as deaf ears see only lower labor costs. The apparent negative effects on productivity and interoffice camaraderie are never taken into account so turnover rates rise while job satisfaction craters. It is a profitable, yet slippery slope.

The salaried employee was a product of workers’ rights and economic actualities that were not properly realized until Henry Ford made the daring decision to forego profits and attract decent employees with sufficient wages. There are hundreds of case studies where a business succeeds by focusing internally and providing their existing employees with higher wages and better working conditions rather than replacing them with cheaper alternatives. Ford realized that you get what you pay for, and the basic principles of economics extend to the labor market irrespective of the industry. Corporations today are not migrating to part-time foreigners because they are greedy capitalist, they are doing so because they are desperate to maintain profitability. Any prudent businessperson understands that outsourcing is negative long-term for core operational functions. It’s a last-ditch effort by failing corporations that put too much reliance on the debt-based financial system.

The topic of immigration has contorted into a contentious political issue that is shrouded by racial connotations when it’s always been a subject of pure indifferent economics.

• Devalued currency causes people to seek labor that pays them in stronger purchasing power. Thus, emigrating to countries with favorable currency.

• Any surplus in the supply of workers causes a decrease in wages, especially if the influx is foreign workers who will do the same job for less.

• Struggling companies will choose to outsource every time, they are fully aware that it’s more expensive in the long run but will choose the painless route for instantaneous profits for shareholders.

The “scab economy" is inevitable with the current globalized system. Corporate positions will slowly but surely be replaced by outsourced consulting firms, foreign workers, and part-time contractors. At first it will be unnoticeable, but then all at once everyone realizes that they are easily replaceable cogs with no job security. The 9-5 salaried Americans will be replaced by a team of Indians that work for half the cost and do half the job. Personability will cease to exist in multinational corporations because they forgot the rules of good business and were apathetic to the people who actually made them money.

The Tower of Babel is a biblical etiology that condemned the practice of multinational unification to, in essence, empower the human race to parallel themselves to God himself. The punishment for which was the confounding of speech and subsequent scattering of peoples around the world. Today we have a globalist effort to congregate the economies of the world into a monstrous inequitable system designed to reach the proverbial heavens of gross domestic product. This “tower” that is the global economy is an insult to laws of economics and God. Economies are supposed to be localized and free of central bank finagling of markets and currency. Thus, “the Lord shall scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.”

Immigration, legal and illegal, is a product of incentives derived from government handouts and currency devaluation. People are inherently inclined to reside in and better the places they grew up in. The lack of physical, political and economic security is relative, but people should not be at fault for understanding the one-sidedness of a globalized economy. Yeah, they may take our jobs but let’s not forget who gave them away in the first place.