At least in Canada, the front counter at McDonald’s has largely been replaced by kiosks.
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Some are, I know a farmer that has 8 ft employees. But some aren’t.
I suspect that it’s not using foreign workers because they can’t get help. They’re paying foreign workers less because they have access to them.
I.e. you have to post a job and it has to sit. After a period of time, you claim nobody suitable and now you can access foreign workers. I know someone who applied to one of those jobs, got hired but they left the post up so they can claim it didn’t get filled.
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Dang, those are some tall employees! 
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I don’t know - why do people still live in Appalachia? Decades of the highest rates of SSDI and welfare spending across the region. People don’t like moving, or don’t know how. There were job booms in the dakotas for years now but apparantly being poor and voting for mostly R politicians to perpetuate their situation is the path they chose. Restricting immigration and forcing up wages won’t do much if the jobs are all somewhere else. They will get to pay more on their next trip to Dollar General though.
I have to think this is part of it. Also, you can probably get income off the books in rural areas.
Its a bit of the chicken and the egg, but it certainly feels good to blame the migrants for taking those other jobs over there for the result. (that’s not so much directed at you, but more generally the popular attitude).
Why not offer gov assistance to help relocate people to where the jobs are. This will even save the gov money since they will not have to pay for snap, medicaid, hud etc.
Running on a plaform of “lets move you out of state” isn’t usually a winning one.
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Unemployment rate is 4% in the united States. You’re basically at full employment. Blaming welfare for a need for immigrants is silly. The federal reserve is basically willling to slow down the economy because wages are rising too quickly. Think about that.
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Because nominal wages are rising too quickly
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We have 8 million unfilled jobs right now after 2 years of the fed trying to pull back the economy. We need more skilled workers for sure, but there is more than enough work here in the US to support meaningful immigration. They might come here low skilled, but they usually young and have children that will become highly skilled over the next 25 years.
If we make unskilled work too expensive, we also run the risk of watching capital leave the country.
I guess I’d like to see unskilled work get paid more, but it feels fundamentally unrealistic over the long term. We can certainly get better with how welfare programs work to reduce the government support and incentivize productivity, but there will always be some need to supplement incomes in those near 0 skill jobs. Our efforts would be better directed towards skilling workers and growing the economy while accepting we can’t eliminate the deadweight at any unskilled labor rate.
Make it voluntary. I doubt everyone who lives in Troy, NY actually wants to be there.
It is 100% voluntary to move to any state any time for any reason, and companies have been recruiting people to move for a while now. People want politicians to make jobs to show up where they live.
A person on welfare hardly has the means to live life, let alone spend money they don’t have on a job interview halfway across the country. Then there is the moving expenses, which they again don’t have. I don’t think a widget plant is paying people to move from NY to WY or CA.
This is very different then the world we live in where there are signing bonuses and relocation incentives.
That’s a wage problem (or wage perception problem), not a lack of worker problem.
Job openings simply mean that employers believe they can increase profits by hiring additional people. Some version of “additional revenue created is greater than the total costs of hiring those additional people.”
Unusually large numbers of open jobs reflect an unusual mismatch between employers thoughts on the market wage and the actual market wage. Maybe firms have been raising prices and that has been driving profits. They figure they can raise profits still more by hiring more people, but they haven’t realized how much wages have gone up.
Suppose we could convince employers that they would have no trouble filling those jobs if they raised their wage by 50%, and no hope of filling them at their current expected wage. I expect that more than half those job openings disappear.
That ship has sailed. Capital that produces goods that get into international trade, and that can be produced with low wage labor, has already left.
We have jobs that don’t produce goods that move across borders. We should concentrate on good wages for those jobs.
We’re all born with our own unique set of genes, and then we have unique childhood experiences. We can’t all work equally “skilled” jobs. The minimum NBA wage is over $1 million. But we don’t think that good coaching will give everyone NBA skills.
Yes, we have an unavoidable number of people who will always be low skilled workers. They are born here and the rest of us are responsible providing them decent lives. We don’t need to make it harder by importing more.
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Living in Newfoundland, and perhaps as a part of getting older, I’ve been amazed at the number of people who are unwilling to get training or move for better work. On the other hand, now that I’m getting well into my 40s I’m also seeing how hard it can be to make new friends now that I’m getting older. It can be a really harsh penalty on the personal side to move for work. Yes, you’re making money. On the other hand, you get to trade that for a lot of pain on the personal side. Is a better income worth the pain?
If you got your guiding license, I could come visit you and we could go moose hunting.
Just saying.
My brother in law is a newfie. Him and half his very large family moved to ontario/alberta in the 80’s for work and stayed. Very stereotypical hard working blue collar folks, and they did make the jump when they were young for work. At 40 though, much harder to uproot your entire life as you noted.
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Speaking of moose hunting, my bil goes back every year. He goes to camp, but doesn’t shoot since he’s an ontario resident now.
A few years ago they’re all hungover of course. Everyone takes off on the hunt, he stays back and says he’ll be along, just finishing his coffee and getting his head straight. He’s not done his coffee, and everyone rolls back into camp. He asks them what they forgot. They forgot nothing. They filled their tags in less than 10 minutes.
Meanwhile I’ve spent a week standing in -40C in the snow in the bush and not seen a single moose.
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Not a moose hunter, but I do enjoy my work group’s annual moose stew.
There was an outfitter I think in Labrador who recently posted a message to clients saying you have to pay extra if you get your moose quickly and want to fly home early. Locally, people here complain that the moose are dropping in numbers, but a lot of others are saying you need to walk into the forest more than half a mile from the road.