I'm anti-immigration. Change my mind.

That's a very interesting idea. I wouldn't support eliminating the minimum wage, but waiving it for minors could be a great way to fill shortages of unskilled labor without immigration.

If it's a good idea to waive it, then it's a good idea to eliminate it. That's a general rule for any legislation including taxes if you want to promote equality under the law.

Besides... why waive it only for teens when there are young felons (and society!) that would benefit greatly from the elimination of the minimum wage. Unskilled labor can include any age group, so just drop the damn minimum wage so they can get a job and produce something for society, even if it's producing something trivial. 

I don't deny that minimum wage laws have an unemployment effect (although you're exaggerating its magnitude). I just think it's worth the cost to preserve a minimum standard of living for American workers. I'm okay with waiving it for minors because most minors aren't financially supporting themselves, so it doesn't really matter how much they earn. 

Treating minors and adults as "equal under the law" is a blatantly absurd and unworkable proposition.

I never said minors ... I said teens...as in 18..19....

And I actually hate the idea of using immigration to fill domestic labor shortages. It's fine as a short-term solution, but in the long-term, we should be reforming our education system and social safety net so that those labor shortages don't exist in the first place (although, again, since immigrant labor tends to be cheaper than American labor, this would cause some price inflation).

Labor shortages aren't a bad thing, they drive up wages and working conditions. The elites emphasize it as such for this reason. 

It also helps to form artificial monopolies as the businesses that can't afford automation go bankrupt.

#1) You claim that immigration should be restricted to the bare minimum levels needed to fill labor shortages, but there is simply no way to accurately compute what that bare level is in a given month or year. Labor shortages are impacted by how many jobs are available, how many more jobs are created, how many Americans decide to go into retirement or stop looking for work, how many positions a company decides to open or close, and those are just things off the top of my head. Restricting the number of immigrants allowed into a country based on numbers that fluctuate or maybe cannot even be calculated simply isn't practical...... 

2) Your first argument is also built on the assumption that unemployed Americans looking for work should be able to fill open jobs before immigrants, but the geography of the country throws a giant wrench into that belief. 30,000 people in New York who are looking for work aren't going to move to Arizona to fill 30,000 farming jobs just because they're available.

3) The second main argument you make against immigration is far weaker than your first one. You start off by focusing entirely on 'immigration without assimilation', and make a bunch of fairly opinionated claims about how it harms things like 'kinship' and 'national identity' which aren't things that can really be measured or evaluated in the first place.

More importantly though is that even if the first generation of immigrants do not assimilate well with society and maintain most of their own languages and culture, later generations from that first generation do assimilate at a better rate, since they grow up learning the languages and customs from early ages rather then be thrusted into it in the second half of life.

4) You claim that immigrants must be selected carefully on the basis of cultural compatibility, but offer no explanation of what that basis is or how to calculate it. How do we calculate the cultural compatibility of someone? By having them speak English? By being Christian? By having them pass a high school level civics exam?

Labor shortages aren't a bad thing, they drive up wages and working conditions. The elites emphasize it as such for this reason. 

Any economic benefits to mass immigration are temporary. After a certain point they'll be numerous to tip elections in the favor of the Democratic Party, and after that they'll just start siphoning off all our national resources for themselves.

how does one support a family of 5 doing seasonal work picking apples under the table?  The kids are going to school, perhaps tax payer funded food, yet no income taxes are being paid.  What about the use of other public works, like roads, heathcare etc, also paid by taxes.  I guess the pro side thinks this stuff just comes from the tooth fairy.

Actually, economists have developed many reliable methods of measuring labor shortages. You can read about some of them here.

Oh neat, I didn't realize they managed to pin it down as well as they could. 

I guess now the only argument that could be made is that there wouldn't be much harm in keeping a slight surplus of the number of immigrants needed to curtail labor shortages rather then keep it at a bare minimum, but that argument doesn't work out well either since historically speaking there have more often then not been economic developments resulting in a large number of unemployed people rather than a large number of unfilled vacancies. 


 

Well, yes... that would constitute a labor shortage. Geography is among the most common reasons why labor shortages exist. As I said, I have no issue with immigrants taking jobs that Americans legitimately can't/won't take.

most of them conclude that immigration without assimilation is terrible for social stability. Check some of them out here, here, and here.

that doesn't make it any less crucial to maximize the assimilation of first-generation immigrants

All of those factors would definitely be taken into consideration when determining cultural compatibility, especially the "speaking English" one

In many cases, there simply aren't any workers available to take the job, regardless of how high the pay-rate is. Those are the kinds of labor shortages that should be filled by immigrants. Leaving them unfilled would just inflict gratuitous harm upon businesses.

I suppose it depends on the sort of labor shortage. Crucial jobs such as the medical field should certainly be filled by immigrants as a short-term solution. That being said, the rate at which this occurs should be quite limited at best - which I think is a point we can agree upon.

Crucial jobs such as the medical field should certainly be filled by immigrants as a short-term solution. That being said, the rate at which this occurs should be quite limited at best - which I think is a point we can agree upon.

There's another angle to that which is worth considering though given America's undying pursuit at being #1 at things. If you want to fill crucial jobs such as areas in medical or engineering fields with immigrant labor, it might be best to not just aim for the bare minimum. Nations that are the most powerful nations in the world, whether it be the Roman Empire, Great Britain, or the US, had a remarkable ability of attracting the worlds best and brightest to their own countries rather then rely only on talent that could be cultivated within their own borders...... Great countries monopolize talent from around the world, not just talent from their own citizens. 

If the ultimate goal is simply achieving economic self-preservation, taking in the bare minimum of talented immigrants is what you aim for. But if you want to have the absolute highest achievement in those fields that sets a golden benchmark compared to the rest of the world, bringing in as much talent from the outside world as you can is the way to do that, and position the country to continue to remain one of the most powerful nations in the world for decades to come. 

I guess now the only argument that could be made is that there wouldn't be much harm in keeping a slight surplus of the number of immigrants needed to curtail labor shortages rather then keep it at a bare minimum

Those first two links have like 40 pages worth of info that I don't really have the time to go through. If you can pinpoint where in those links the studies address social stability for immigration, that would be helpful. 

if you want to measure an immigrants ability to assimilate into a country, knowledge of how the government works and ability to speak English is fine with me, but also as far as I would go. Anything beyond that for the most part is arbitrary and should not be enforced just because we want to cull down the numbers. 

The only additional factor I'd really want to include is some sort of subjective assessment via interview. Professional interviewers are capable of discerning quite a lot about a person, and I think that skill-set could be applied towards determining whether or not a potential immigrant is likely to assimilate culturally.