CAT4 RC: Which... can be inferred about U.S. employers?

[foobarnull]

Q: Which of the following can be inferred about U.S. employers of Mexican immigrants?

(B) Some of these employers violate wage laws. // CORRECT. If some of these immigrant workers are accepting wages "well below the U.S. minimum wage," their American employers must be violating wage laws (i.e. paying wages below what the U.S. minimum wage requires).

"...are often more than willing to work for wages well below both the U.S. minimum wage and the poverty line."
Willing does not imply that they are actually accepting wages below the minimum wage, does it?


Also, about option D:
(D) Without Mexican immigrants, some of these employers would be forced to close their businesses. // The passage does not suggest that, without labor from Mexico, these employers will be forced to close. This answer is both too predictive and outside the scope of the argument.
"For years, U.S. employers have counted on a steady flow of labor from Mexico willing to accept low-skilled, low paying jobs."



"Counted on" makes Option D sound much more viable than Choice B to me... could you please explain the test maker's rationale behind this?

[foobarnull]

i'd appreciate a reply from anyone... taking the test soon :shock:

[esledge]

We apologize for the delay in answering your question. This is a busy time of year, and we are working through the backlog as quickly as we can!

For RC questions, please post the text of the passage. Three reasons: The instructors don't necessarily have access to the passages as we answer questions on the forum, seeing the passage will benefit other forum users, and the answer is really found in the passage. Thanks!

[foobarnull]

disappointing turnaround time, but no worries. done with the test; couldn't care less now.

[esledge]

OK.

For the record, too much of our time on the forum is spent enforcing the rules (to avoid copyright infringement) and asking for clarification, as above. My apologies go to the many forum users who follow protocol. Many thanks for your continued support.

[rahulajith86]

-----Here is the text -----
For years, U.S. employers have counted on a steady flow of labor from Mexico willing to accept low-skilled, low paying jobs. These workers, many of whom leave economically depressed villages in the Mexican interior, are often more than willing to work for wages well below both the U.S. minimum wage and the poverty line. However, thanks to a dramatic demographic shift currently taking place in Mexico, the seemingly inexhaustible supply of workers migrating from Mexico to the United States might one day greatly diminish if not cease.
Predictions of such a drastic decrease in the number of Mexican immigrants, both legal and illegal, are driven by Mexico’s rapidly diminishing population growth. As a result of a decades-long family planning campaign, most Mexicans are having far fewer children than was the norm a generation ago. The campaign, organized around the slogan that "the small family lives better," saw the Mexican government establish family-planning clinics and offer free contraception. For nearly three decades, the government’s message concerning population hasn’t wavered. In fact, the Mexican Senate recently voted to extend public school sex education programs to kindergarten.
The result of Mexico’s efforts to stem population growth is nothing short of stunning. In 1968, the average Mexican woman had just fewer than seven children; today, the figure is slightly more than two. For two primary reasons, Mexico’s new demographics could greatly impact the number of Mexicans seeking work in the U.S. First, smaller families by their nature limit the pool of potential migrants. Second, the slowing of Mexico’s population growth has fostered hope that Mexico will develop a healthy middle class of people content to make their livelihoods in their home country.
Though the former of these factors is all but assured, the growth of a healthy middle class is far from a foregone conclusion. The critical challenge for Mexico is what it does with the next 20 years. Mexico must invest in education, job training, and infrastructure, as well as a social-security system to protect its aging population. If Mexico is willing to step forward and meet this challenge, America may one day wake up to find that, like cheap gasoline, cheap Mexican labor has become a thing of the past.


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Question
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Which of the following can be inferred about U.S. employers of Mexican immigrants?
· Most of these employers pay Mexican immigrants less money than they pay American citizens.
· Some of these employers violate wage laws.
· Many of these employers work in the agricultural
industry.
· Without Mexican immigrants, some of these
employers would be forced to close their businesses.
· The majority of these employers show no concern
for the welfare of their workers.


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The official Answer is B. I strongly dis-agree. the passage says " the workers.....'are often more than willing to work for wages well below both the U.S. minimum wage and the poverty line' "

Just because workers are willing to work doesn't mean that US employers are employing them at rates below the minimum wage. The passage does not have sufficient content/text/evidence to prove B.

[RonPurewal]

The official Answer is B. I strongly dis-agree. the passage says " the workers.....'are often more than willing to work for wages well below both the U.S. minimum wage and the poverty line' "

Just because workers are willing to work doesn't mean that US employers are employing them at rates below the minimum wage. The passage does not have sufficient content/text/evidence to prove B.

* yeah, ok, i see your point here -- but that sentence is directly after another sentence about "low-paying jobs" that actually do exist.
for your complaint to be valid, those two sentences would have to be completely unrelated to each other -- and that's just not how passages are written. if there's an obvious relationship, then that relationship doesn't have to be spelled out in excruciatingly precise detail; they expect you to connect the dots if the dots are close enough together.

(e.g.
You wouldn't believe the things Lee does for Sarah. He even built a spare closet in his house.
--> if you use your logic above, you'd say, "we don't actually know whether Lee built the closet for Sarah or just built it at random."
but, yeah, we can infer that he built the closet for sarah, because otherwise the juxtaposition of these two sentences wouldn't make any sense.)

* more importantly... which choice do you think is better?
even if you think a certain choice isn't quite perfect, that's not a truly valid complaint unless you can claim that one of the other choices is better.