Let me just point out that losing 5% of the workforce like that will make inflation skyrocket, because we’ll have to increase wages on a lot of jobs done for shit pay by undocumented migrants. (Should those jobs pay well now? Of course. But they don’t.) You think houses are expensive now? Just wait until construction grinds to a standstill because there’s no laborers available. Groceries cost too much? Guess who is working in those fields?
Again: we should be paying those people fair wages now. But without significantly raising those wages, which will also raise the cost of the goods they currently produce, you aren’t going to get many citizens to do the jobs.
EDIT: one of the larger inputs for produce is labor. If we had to pay labor for picking, cleaning, and sorting produce $20/hr (which is the floor that I’d consider semi-acceptable for that kind of work), you would end up seeing a lot of prices rise sharply in the grocery store, particularly because we simply can’t automate most of that. And believe me, companies are trying, because they won’t want to pay the slave wages that they do now. If you had to pay all construction workers at least $20/hr–which is below the acceptable rate, IMO–housing costs would have to rise to accommodate the cost of the labor. Lots of restaurants still use undocumented labor; they’d have to increase menu prices. And so on, and so forth. We, all of in the US, benefit from the poor treatment of undocumented migrants, and it’s largely invisible to us.
that will probably happen, but it’s actually just rich people pocketing the made up price increase while waiting for poor people to be desperate enough to work for the same low wage as the lost workers
I mean, yes, but also no.
For that to really work, you need a labor surplus, i.e., more workers than jobs. As long as there are more jobs than workers, workers are incentivized to hop jobs to get better pay, perks, and working conditions. It’s in the best interest of the capital-owning class to keep a certain level of the population unemployed so that there are always more workers than jobs; that allows them to pocket more of the value that the workers are adding, because the workers have less leverage to negotiate better wages.
But when you suddenly lost 5% of your workforce, and they’re jobs that are physically demanding (and in the case of construction, are a genuinely skilled trade), then capital-owning class doesn’t have the leverage over workers. That’s especially true when the capitalist can’t easily move operations to an area with cheap labor; if you’re a contractor, you’re going to operate where there’s demand for construction, not where there’s cheap labor. An e.g. contractor can’t just not build; they lose money by sitting on land, or on equipment that isn’t being capitalized.
