Unit_1_-_Social_Issues

What employers mean when they refer to labor shortages is “shortage at the wage we prefer to pay.” Here’s how this preference operates in the labor market. Back in the mid1970s, meatpacking was an industry overwhelmingly characterized by native-born labor. Meatpackers earned an average of $17.41 an hour, only slightly less than the average wage in all manufacturing. (All the dollar figures I’m about to use are inflation-adjusted to 2006 purchasing power.) Over the next three decades, native-born labor in the meatpacking industry was displaced by immigrant labor, much of it illegal. Wages correspondingly collapsed. By 2006, meatpackers averaged $11.47 an hour, more than $5 less than the average manufacturing wage—which had itself declined nearly $1.25 over the same period. What’s happened to meatpacking has happened to other occupations, both unskilled (notably janitorial) and highly skilled (software engineering).

On the other hand, there’s no question that immigration has brought huge benefits to others: the immigrants themselves, of course, but also those whose work is less susceptible to immigrant competition—and who buy goods and services whose cost is lowered by immigrant labor. It’s often said that immigration is good for “the economy.” This is true, in aggregate. Immigration means a bigger gross domestic product than we’d otherwise have. (More people equals more output.) Immigration likewise means higher productivity than we’d otherwise have. (The accountant who once vacuumed her own floor can now more readily hire Merry Maids to do the job instead, enabling her to spend more of her time billing clients.) And of course other things being equal, over time higher productivity should imply higher average incomes.

But nobody lives in “the economy.” Each of us live in our own personal economy, and more than most economic policies, immigration concentrates its benefits on some and loads its harms on others. That higher income “on average” conceals the arithmetic that the harms of immigration fall on poorer Americans while the benefits mostly accrue to wealthier people and to immigrants themselves.

It’s hard, however, to appreciate that arithmetic if you’re one of those luckier beneficiaries.

American society is already organized so much in your favor that you almost come to expect one more advantage as just the way things were ordained to be. And since people like you dominate politics and media, you get one more advantage on top of all the others: the gratifying feeling that you are on the only side of the immigration argument that is entitled to a respectful hearing.

Newsweek, 6 May 2013

33. Academic Vocabulary in Use

Study Units 45, 46, 49 and do the exercises

34.Pair work – projects (Identify-Analyse-Suggest):

1)browse the Internet and identify a pressing problem,

2)analyse its causes,

3)analyse the current situation,

4)analyse its possible implications,

5)suggest ideas to solve it,

6)present your findings and conclusions to the class.