A headline, and a couple of sentences in an article in todays paper caught my eye, and gave me a chuckle.
" Shortage Of Foreign Labor Forces Maine Businesses To Hire Local Workers. Businesses in Bar Harbor, Maine are turning to locals to make up for a shortage of foreign guest workers that normally fill summer jobs in the bustling seaside resort town.The shortage is so acute that companies have gone so far as to offer higher wages to entice locals."
GEE WHAT A CONCEPT!
And a related article;
Employers are demanding the Trump administration raise the cap on the H-2B visa guest worker program because they supposedly can’t find enough Americans to fill job vacancies.
“In economics, the price of anything, even workers rises if demand outstrips supply and, of course, the price of workers is primarily wages. However, wage data shows in both the long and short term there have been little to no wage increases in many of the most common H-2B occupations, and in many cases wages show an outright decline. the Center for Immigration Studies compared U.S. government wage data for eight job categories from 2007 to average wages in the same fields from 2013 to 2015, the last year for which data is available. They found that inflation-adjusted wages increased in just two of the categories and either stagnated or fell for the other six. Collectively, real wages across the H-2B categories were 1.3 percent lower in 2015 than they were in 2007. The rationale for approving more H-2B visas is “highly questionable” in light of the government’s own data, which shows that wages have largely fallen in the low-skill occupations seasonal workers often fill. Allowing wages to increase can be seen as a positive development because it reduces social inequality and encourages work,” But even assuming that rising wages are a negative development that must be addressed by increased immigration, there is still no evidence in the wage data that workers are in short supply. So the stated reason for the increase in the H-2B program is unsupported.