Shadowing Practice: 移民搶工作，還是最低工資害的？大學生 vs 保守派 8 分鐘完整辯論｜中英字幕 - Learn English Speaking with Video
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I guess in the free market example, you have 100 people, but there's no illegal immigration, but there's no minimum wage.
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These people are naturally incentivized to get together and agree, you know, we won't accept any wage lower than this,
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like collective bargaining, which is kind of like a socialist principle.
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So I guess I'm just proposing if these...
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Well, they can do that, but at the end of the day, the business owner will be able to decide, right?
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It's true.
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And if these people, then they're going to starve.
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You know, you work or don't eat.
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I guess that's fair, yeah.
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I guess my argument here is that the capitalist system that we have, you know, with free markets inherently drifts towards this kind of cronyism
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and I think part of this economic system enables
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and in part requires the mass immigration that we see today
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and I mean maybe it's it's weird to think about
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but I'll give like a little economics example I guess imagine there's a thousand people at this university
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and there's like 10 jobs on university
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and everybody says I will no longer accept any what's it called any wage lower than $15 an hour all
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So these people are thinking, okay, well, I'm not going to get paid $14 or $13.
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But it's in these companies' interests, these businesses that work there,
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simply to make the most money and to expand that they need people who will accept less wages.
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So let's say, well, why don't we bring in a whole bunch of people from overseas?
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Yes, I see the argument that you're making, and I don't mean to interrupt you, but it's rather long.
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The point is not with immigrants.
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The point is with minimum wage laws.
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Because minimum wage laws are not free market.
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You are telling an employer what amount they are able to pay an employee, right?
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I'm not sure.
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Do you know what the profit margin of the majority of small businesses in America is?
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I assume it's pretty slim.
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It's 1 % is the average, right?
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So now let's say you're a business and you don't have a minimum wage
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and you're paying two guys $10 an hour to go and work and sell sandwiches, whatever.
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Now the government comes in and says, well, you have to pay these people $15 an hour.
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What does that do?
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You've got to fire a guy, right?
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And so now you're paying, maybe one guy gets paid a little bit more, but now you have less of a worker.
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It makes your business suffer, right?
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The business owner should be the one in a free market to decide how much I pay this person.
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And if someone comes in and says, well, that's not fair, then they can go to a different business, right?
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Or achieve different skills to advance themselves to go and do a different thing themselves, right?
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So it's not actually an immigration debate you're having on that.
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It's a minimum wage law debate.
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All right.
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I understand where you're coming from.
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And for the sake of the example, or my argument, let's say there was no minimum wage laws, there would still kind of be a societal,
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say there's 100 people, you know, they all need this amount to survive, or they want this amount.
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And I think immigration, see if there still is no minimum wage laws, let's say they're paying a guy like 10 bucks.
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If you could still bring in a guy and pay him one bucks as a business owner, you totally would, right?
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Right.
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But you can do that with an American citizen, too, if you have no minimum wage law
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because you could have before 1960 right this country was like 90 percent white
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and pretty much everyone was legal everyone was actually a citizen of this country right
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so how did we get these things done before
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that right you know what i mean you know i'm saying
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so it's like people were willing to do those jobs
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and take less money and then build themselves up or
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if it said oh i'm not getting paid enough here
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or i don't like my boss i'll go find a different type of job
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you know what i mean yeah no i agree with you saying um i guess i just have to touch like inflation.
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I mean, you know, back in the 1950s, 1960s, a lot of people could afford a house,
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a home, a college education with a lot less work than we do have nowadays.
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And my argument is just the more people we have and the more people that move in,
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the less your average person gets paid because there's so many people
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that the value of like how much it pays one person goes down.
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So I guess my value of labor does go down with more immigration.
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So I guess my argument is
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that our economic system needs the value of labor to go down to reduce input costs because we want cheaper stuff.
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Everybody here, they want to consume goods, whether it be media or iPhones or food.
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And in order for that, you know, you can do a lot of supply chain management.
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By the end of the day, it really comes down to how low can we get the cost of labor?
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And if you were to go completely libertarian with it and say, you know, completely free markets and all of this,
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then having completely free markets with no regulations is the only way you can have illegal immigration.
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Because if you don't have completely free markets and you have wage, minimum wage laws, you have regulations, you have anti -globalism, you have tariffs,
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you have protectionism, all these different things, it will not induce business to actually thrive,
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and people will get the shaft on that for the immigrants and for the citizens who are in that country.
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Because then there's no reason for them to pay American citizens that wage.
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If they know they can pay an illegal immigrant less, then why would they pay an American citizen more for the same job?
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Exactly.
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Right.
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Which is what I'm saying, and that's part of the minimum wage.
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So if you got rid of the minimum wage, then maybe some American comes and says,
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well, I'll work on a farm for the same price that an illegal immigrant is doing it for now,
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you know, and then build my way up.
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You have that freedom.
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But with minimum wage laws, you don't have that freedom.
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Yeah, I have to agree with that.
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But I still think that as business owners, your interest is you must make as much profit
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or else someone else will make more profit you outcompete
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you you lose right thank goodness that's how it should be um
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and that's a that's a very dynamic system
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and allows for a lot of the companies we have nowadays
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which can really create a lot of you know gdp
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and buildings and everything around us but i would argue
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that it is in their inherent interest simply to make profit
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that illegal immigration and immigration as a whole is desired so it's
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In my view, at least, it's impossible to view immigration as an issue in itself
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when you need to consider that these businesses really want that as well.
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Right, but if they could choose to pay, if an American could choose to have themselves work for less, they would.
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The problem is a minimum wage of why these people want to bring in illegals
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because they're forced to pay an American citizen this much.
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Whereas if they're an illegal alien, they can pay them whatever they want, right?
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Right?
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So of course.
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But if you had people in a total free market and said, oh, we can pay this person whatever I want
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and then I can choose to be paid whatever I want within the market, whatever this employer wants to pay me,
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and people can shop around and say this job's good, this one's not, then the illegal immigration is,
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you know, it's not nearly as worthwhile for businesses to want because they can just pay citizens.
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I mean, paying people less, they'll have less money to spend.
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That lowers the standard of living.
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I guess this is kind of a weird shift to the argument.
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I guess it's better phrased as like, if we even allow this as a thing to happen, even if it's just paying people less,
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these companies still need to make money.
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They're still going to lower input costs and the quality of your average person.
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And we're putting quality in terms of material,
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which I don't really think your life and your happiness is determined by how many things you can buy.
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You know, money doesn't buy happiness.
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I think it's a lot more meaningful than that.
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But in our current society, you know, money and well -being is mostly just financial.
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How much money do I have?
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How much new things can I buy?
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You know, all that sort of thing.
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If you allow these businesses to, I guess, in the free market example, you have 100 people, but there's no illegal immigration,
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but there's no minimum wage.
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These people are naturally incentivized to get together and agree, you know, we won't accept any wage lower than this,
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like collective bargaining, which is kind of like a socialist principle.
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So I guess I'm just proposing.
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Well, they can do that, but at the end of the day, the business owner will be able to decide, right?
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It's true.
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And if these people, then they're going to starve.
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You know, you work or don't eat.
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I guess that's fair, yeah.
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That's how you've got to look at it, you know.
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These are able -bodied people.
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So, I guess how you put it...
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I'll end it with this, just back and forth.
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Because I know I've got other people in line.
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I don't want everyone to get held up.
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I guess I'll come back later.
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But in order to solve the illegal immigration problem in an incentive purpose, you would have to lower the minimum,
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or you'd have to remove minimum wages to allow for dynamic labor?
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Yes.
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that is definitely part of the problem yes i just personally worry
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that this kind of decreases your average living
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and i think it makes people on a i think people as a whole would come together
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if they're getting paid
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so little yeah i mean that's what unions are yeah you know people have the ability to make unions
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and do those kind of things not that usually they do any good
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but um that that is their freedom to be able to do right yeah
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but like if a business was run by five of its own workers
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and there was no real incentive to make a massive amount of profit
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but more just i guess it doesn't work that way
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because uh they need to make profit to have their job secured
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but um like a business owned by its own workers would
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never support importing people to replace them for lower wages
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so they make more money so my argument is
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that businesses themselves as they're currently structured any employee wouldn't want someone to come in
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and take their job even if they don't own the means of production exactly
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but an executive would because they can pay them less
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so I'm just saying I'll end it here
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because I mean right it's kind of like why you have to stop illegal immigration
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Thank you.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “移民搶工作，還是最低工資害的？大學生 vs 保守派 8 分鐘完整辯論｜中英字幕”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: wage, minimum, guess, immigration, illegal. This video has 160 sentences and 1945 words to shadow. The speech runs for 9:03. The speaker talks fast, about 215 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 88% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is easy to follow.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| wage noun | /weɪd͡ʒ/ | An amount of money paid to a worker for a specified quantity of work, usually calculated on an hourly basis and expressed in an amount of money per hour. |
| immigration noun | /ˌɪmɪˈɡɹeɪʃən/ | The act of immigrating; the passing or coming into a country of which one is not native born for the purpose of permanent residence. |
| citizen noun | /ˈsɪtɪzən/ | A resident of a city or town, especially one with legally recognized rights or duties. |
| immigrant noun | /ˈɪmɪɡɹənt/ | A non-native person who comes to a country from another country to permanently settle there. |
| worker noun | /ˈwɝ.kɚ/ | One who works: a person who performs labor for a living; traditionally, especially, manual labor. |
| naturally adverb | /ˈnæt͡ʃ.(ə.)ɹə.li/ | In a natural manner. |
| happiness noun | /ˈhæpinɪs/ | The emotion of being happy; joy; elation. |
| regulation noun | /ˌɹɛɡjʊˈleɪʃən/ | The act of regulating or the condition of being regulated. |
| input noun | /ˈɪnpʊt/ | The act or process of putting in; infusion. |
| principle noun | /ˈpɹɪn.sɪ.pəl/ | A fundamental assumption, fundamental law or guiding belief. |
| dynamic adjective | /daɪˈnæm.ɪk/ | Changing; active; in motion. |
| collective adjective | /kəˈlɛktɪv/ | Formed by gathering or collecting; gathered into a mass, sum, or body. |
| employer noun | /ɪmˈplɔɪə/ | A person, firm or other entity which pays for or hires the services of another person. |
| socialist noun | /ˈsoʊ.ʃə.lɪst/ | One who supports or advocates socialism. |
| nowadays adverb | /ˈnaʊ.ə.deɪz/ | At the present time; in the current era. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| get together verb | To meet, to gather together, to congregate. | |
| come back verb | To return to a place. | |
| come down to verb | To reach by moving down or reducing. | |
| come together verb | /ˈkʌm tʊˈɡɛðɚ/ | To assemble; to congregate; to combine. |
| go down verb | To descend; to move from a higher place to a lower one. | |
| go down with verb | To catch or contract (an illness). | |
| hold up verb | To wait or delay. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- You know, you work or don't eat.
- You've got to fire a guy, right?
- I understand where you're coming from.
- How much money do I have?
- How much new things can I buy?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | are naturally incentivized · is desired · be paid |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | bargaining, which is · people who will |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 50 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, I'm, they're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: worthwhile /ˌwɜː(ɹ)θˈwaɪl/, thrive /θɹajv/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: immigration /ˌɪmɪˈɡɹeɪʃən/, regulation /ˌɹɛɡjʊˈleɪʃən/, socialist /ˈsoʊ.ʃə.lɪst/, inflation /ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃən/, shaft /ˈʃɑːft/
- Long words — get the stress right: immigration /ˌɪmɪˈɡɹeɪʃən/, naturally /ˈnæt͡ʃ.(ə.)ɹə.li/, regulation /ˌɹɛɡjʊˈleɪʃən/, economics /ˌiːkəˈnɒmɪks/, capitalist /ˈkæp.ɪ.tə.lɪst/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like wage, immigration, citizen.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.