Immigration's other side

Barry Neuman of the Wall Street Journal makes an interesting point: what happens when businesses can't find enough workers because only immigrants or foreign workers are eager to fill certain positions? For instance, logging seems to be mostly a Canadian endeavor in Maine, and some sawmills and paper manufacturers are operating at lower capacity. Construction, restaurants, farming, and several other industries could have some serious under-staffing consequences if suddenly only American citizens were eligible to work there. Of course, if wages suddenly were raised, to say $25/hour for so-called low-skill jobs, like lawn care, dishwashers, grape pickers, layers-of-drywall, etc., the crisis would be averted. But, realistically, a lot of SBA members would wet their pants if a Living Wage law was passed.

[Bertrand] Pruneau is caught in a national fight over how many foreigners, legal and illegal, should be allowed to work here. In the Maine woods, the debate has been turned on its head. If Mr. Pruneau's presence, as some argue, has been stealing American jobs, his absence could threaten many more.

Wary of heightened immigration enforcement, employers of all kinds are trying to hire foreign workers legally. Demand for temporary seasonal visas is overwhelming a limited supply. As a result Mr. Pruneau and several hundred fellow Canadians have found themselves being booted out of the country after only six months, for the second year in a row. Yet few Americans have rushed to fill their places. In Maine, that has led to a shortage of loggers, a supply crisis at sawmills and a profit squeeze at pulp mills as printers shop for lower-cost paper on other continents

Mainers have long asked themselves if logging, like grape picking, is a job Americans just won't do. Troy Jackson, a logger and state legislator, believes the visa program denies work to U.S. citizens. He calls the H-2B program “cheap labor for big corporations,” and is happy to see the Canadian loggers kept out.

“Canadians can work for less,” Mr. Jackson says. “They don't ask for health care. The exchange rate still gives them an extra 20% on the dollar. So landowners in Maine use them to get the wood cut cheaper.”

By law, every job a Canadian gets must be first advertised in Maine at the government-certified rate, which on average is $27,000. Few Americans apply. A 1999 study commissioned by the state found that Canadians don't depress pay, except in pockets of the far north. American loggers, it concluded, simply hate camping out in deep woods.

“Certainly, there's some level of wage that would attract American workers,” says Lloyd Irland, a forestry consultant who helped write the study. But that would necessitate raising pay not only for a few hundred Americans who would replace the Canadians, but for the American loggers and thousands of others doing related jobs.

“The question is, could our industry survive at that wage level?” Mr. Irland says. “My short answer is, no. We're in a very cruel market. Several of our paper mills have been in and out of bankruptcy. A lot of people are struggling to keep our mills alive.”

{Current Affairs}

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