Could not agree more. We don't need low skilled workers. Our immigration ought to focus on the highly skilled, the entrepreneurs, those with existing capital and the like. Get away from family oriented immigration to value added immigration.
In the little town I live in in North Georgia there is a chicken processing plant that runs an employment ad in the paper continuously. They pay $14.50 an hour to start for unskilled labor plus health benefits for the worker and offer a plan for family members, partly paid by the worker. I know it's not the most glamorous or best paying job but $14.50 a hour for unskilled labor gets you, with a little overtime every week, at about $30k a year before taxes with benefits. UNSKILLED LABOR!
The majority of the people who fill these jobs are from Mexico and Guatemala. It is a large Hispanic community in the county and they support several locally run businesses, who pay taxes as do the workers, and also at least two large churches that I know of. They are not without their problems as the paper prints a weekly arrest report which always has a few Hispanic names; mostly DUI, driving without a license and insurance and the like.
The majority of the arrests are from the locals which tend to be drug related, breaking and entering, assault and battery and the more violent offenses. None of them applied for the jobs in the chicken plant I guess, nor would they I assume.
My point is that a UBI is always going to be sought by the ones who least actually need it. And the basic jobs in the country will still need to rely on "imported" labor. And many of those jobs will never be fully automated, just like the chicken plant.
