Trump administration's war on immigrants projected to shrink GDP by 6.8% for 2025: turns out that in addition to arrest/deportation, three times as many workers have left the USA voluntarily ... and meanwhile, employers are carrying out mass layoffs because their businesses are no longer viable ("legal" US citizens aren't exactly lining up to work in the fields).
Slump is deepening, heading for Great Depression 2.0.
https://open.substack.com/pub/chadbourn/p/everything-is-connected-9
@cstross Classic example of fuck around and find out.
Nor will US citizens lineup to work in the fields. US citizens do work in farms; a good chunk of them are basically slave labor from the prison system. It’s hard to compete with the wage scale of prison labor.
Farm work is not only physically demanding, it’s skilled labor.
It’s not something you can simply walk into the field, even if you have the physical conditioning and perform the task as efficiently as people who have been doing this kind of work most of their lives.
@cstross Everybody recall what wonders the xenophobic project that is Brexit did for the British economy.
At first the brexitiers said the UK would be 'liberated' and everyone would be financially better off but quickly it evolved into "We don't care what it does to the Economy, we don't like Forrins"
Almost 10 years later and is the UK prospering? Is it happy?
@cstross
what is GDP without the stock market factored in?
how are other countries doing with economic recession that are still importing immigrants?
@soapone Population growth outside of Africa is now largely driven by immigration, with TFR crashing below 2.05 almost everywhere else. Economic output generally scales with population. But immigration barriers are crashing down everywhere—xenophobic nationalism coupled with climate-change-induced migration. It's too long to sum up in a single toot, but it's bad all round, although the US is handling it *spectacularly* badly under Trump.
@cstross Agriculture is about as automated as it's going to get, and there's lots of hand-work left. Picking apples is rather different from working on an assembly line.
@cstross they wrote Great Recession, not Depression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Recession
