The Biden Administration’s change in policy regarding the massive arrival of cubans to the United States, who in large part settle or spend a long time in the south of the Floridais a response, among other things, to the threat perceived by residents, including, first of all, immigrants already settled, who fear seeing their jobs damaged or lost.
Not surprisingly, they are precisely already resident immigrants are the most reluctant to receive new immigration. In psychology, it has been well studied how those subjects who overcome a stressful situation or in which they have invested many economic and/or emotional resources, value the status achieved even more than those who have always had it, with which they perceive a greater threat and respond with greater violence if that status is, from their perspective, endangered.
Popular wisdom has identified this fact and knows that there is no more fervent believer than the convert, or taken to a typical Cuban stamp, it is known that those who are inside the bus always find it excessively full, while those who are about to get on , they always consider that it is possible to “take one more step”, writes Rafaela Cruz in Cuban newspaper.
That impression that immigration endangers the work of residentsmainly those with lower-skilled jobs (which is another reason why established immigrants, who are the ones who usually fill these jobs, feel threatened by subsequent waves of migration), may even seem to be supported by economic theory. .
It is economic logic that with equal demand, a greater offer makes the price fall, so in this case, an accelerated increase in people offering their labor force should cause the salaries of already established emigrants to fall, or that they lose their jobs. to newcomers more willing to work for less. But is it really so?
The supply-demand model, while intuitive, is extremely superficial to scrutinize the complex dynamics that generates the massive arrival of immigrants in a short period of time on a labor market. There are side effects that this approach does not detect.
People, by mediating their activity with thoughts, are not completely reactive, but rather teleological, that is, they act both because of stimuli and to obtain desired ends, which are very subjective, which is why it is so difficult to mathematically model human action, something that The modern economy sins a lot.
The supply-demand simplification, for example, lose sight of how part of the local population will react that, faced with the massive arrival, decides, anticipating labor competition, to move to other states, which cushions the net effect of the arrival of new immigrants.
Something of extraordinary importance is also left out of the analysis: business reaction. These, if they anticipate that salary costs will fall due to the increase in supply, can invest to take advantage of such an opportunity. They can even divert to Florida, for this reason, investment previously destined for other states.
The Ricardo effect is another result of the business community’s response, which refers to the fact that when labor becomes cheaper in relation to fixed capital, investment in the latter decreases and even the introduction of new technologies is delayed, increasing investment on relatively cheap labor. Both of these possible business responses may end up causing a net increase in jobs.
Nor can it be ruled out that the new immigrants focus their consumption on those cheap goods produced by the immigrant workers themselves, which would increase the demand in this sector by stimulating the production of the immigrants themselves, which would create new job opportunities for them.
The above are not simple hypotheses. The natural experiment carried out by David Card, a Canadian economist specializing in labor markets and Nobel Prize winner, on the Mariel case, when more than 100,000 Cubans arrived in South Florida at once, is famous. The study found that, contrary to what one might think, this huge influx, which reached an increase of 7% of the labor force, had practically no effect on local wages and unemployment rates, not even for those workers of lower income.
So, although everyone may have reasons to support or not support the US policy towards Cuban emigration, depending on their family, political or other priorities, they have good reasons to rule out the San Benito threat on the employment that politicians and unionists hang, with frequent demagogy, about the arrival in large volumes and in a short time of new immigrants.
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FUENTE: With information from Diario de Cuba