Do immigrants take jobs away from native-born Americans? Apparently, a complicated question.
Immigrants and the Economics of Hard Work - New York Times IT is asserted both as fact and as argument: the United States needs a constant flow of immigrants to perform jobs Americans will not stoop to do.But what if those jobs paid $50 an hour, with benefits, instead of $7 or $10 or $15? “Of course there are jobs that few Americans will take because the wages and working conditions have been so degraded by employers,” said Jared Bernstein, of the liberal Economic Policy Institute. “But there is nothing about landscaping, food processing, meat cutting or construction that would preclude someone from doing these jobs on the basis of their nativity. Nothing would keep anyone, immigrant or native born, from doing them if they paid better, if they had health care.”While Mr. Bernstein would agree that the least-educated American workers are at a disadvantage, he does not favor curbs on immigration. Even the least-skilled Americans benefit from the presence of a large pool of immigrant workers, Mr. Bernstein said. He said that the 11 million illegal immigrants are consumers, too, creating demand for goods and services and the jobs they produce. He also said their willingness to work at low wages helps keep inflation in check, benefiting the nation as a whole.
“It's quite clear that immigrants lead to lower prices of goods and services, and the lower inflation helps boost the economy, and that helps all Americans,” Mr. Bernstein said. “You have a significant increase in the labor supply due to immigrant inflows, yet the wage effects seem isolated among the least educated, and they're not huge.”
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Joel Kotkin, a fellow at the New America Foundation, a public policy institute, said that the American economy is large enough to absorb most of the new immigrants without pushing too many native-born Americans to the margins.But he said the situation could change dramatically if the economy were to enter a downturn, particularly in the housing sector where thousands of immigrants are laborers. If the housing bubble popped, Mr. Kotkin said, competition for the remaining jobs would be fierce and could stoke anti-immigrant sentiments. He recalled the anti-immigrant proposition approved by Californians in 1994, when the state was mired in recession. “The important factor is the state of the economy,” he said. “An economy that is growing rapidly can absorb these people more easily than one that isn't.”
I do know that all the racist bluster about immigrants is just that, policy by sound-bite. If the government really wanted to stop illegal immigration, for whatever reason, the solution would be to seriously fine the businesses that hire illegals. Take away their corporate charter or something equally as drastic. If say, Wal-Mart was forced into receivership, do you think other corporations would take the risk?
Reminds me of the 'Drug War' - lots of talk, but if the bloviating class (politicians and so forth) wanted to reduce the importation of illegal drugs, the real answer would be to go after the banks who store the trillions of dollars of drug profits. Freeze the assets of JP Morgan Chase, Banco Popular, BCCI, etc., and see how quickly the illegal drug trade dries up (or drugs become legalized as they should be). Of course, the worldwide economy would crash and burn, but this is all hypothetical anyway.
Tags: drugs, /immigration
