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Many observers-including
some highly educated ones-have made the mistake of looking at foreign
workers performing lower-skilled tasks today and assuming that, if not
for them, there would be no one to do the jobs.
Reason,
a libertarian magazine, displayed this distortion on its cover for
April 1995. Across a drawing of the head of the Statue of Liberty hung
a sign: "Closed for Business." Next to it, the cover story promotion
stated: "An Economy Without Immigrants: The real world consequences of
shutting out foreign workers." Inside, the author detailed the
number of foreign-born persons in various fields of work. "Who is going
to pick the lettuce and tomatoes?" the article asked. "Who is going to
design the computers? And, of course, the questions don't stop there.
Without Ethiopians, who will be the parking attendants in San
Jose? Without Haitians, who will drive Miami's taxis? Without Filipino
nurses and Pakistani doctors, who will care for the ill in inner-city
and rural hospitals? Without Mexicans, who will build houses in North
Carolina? ”1
The author and editors
revealed a common misunderstanding of three key aspects of the labor
market and immigration:
1. Shutting off
immigration would not mean that recent immigrants would leave their
jobs. Nobody is proposing to ship away the foreign-born persons in this
country-except perhaps for the small percentage of them who are illegal
aliens. Even if all future immigration were shut off tomorrow, all the
immigrants already working here would still be working. Any resulting
change in the workforce would be gradual.
2. In many cases,
so-called immigrant occupations already have Americans working
alongside foreigners. There are plenty of unemployed Americans who
might take those jobs if they began opening up after a halt in
immigration, especially if the workplace culture once again
became American- and English-speaking. That was demonstrated
in 1995 when immigration agents conducted massive arrests of illegal
aliens, removing thousands from plants in six southern states. Within
days, the majority of those vacant jobs were filled with American
workers. "That says something about the oft-heard claim that illegal
workers take only the jobs legal workers don't want," said Doris
Meissner, head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Tens of
millions of dollars in annual income was transferred overnight from
aliens to Americans. If there were plenty of Americans to take the jobs
illegal aliens had, one has to assume there would be even more willing
to do the work that legal immigrants do.2
3. For other "immigrant
jobs," there may not be a sufficient number of Americans who
would take them as they now exist because the pay and working
conditions are so deplorable-the meatpacking industry being a notable
example. The presence of immigrants keeps those wages and conditions
from improving to the point where Americans would take the jobs.
Without the availability of new immigrants, though, employers would
have to make innovations and improvements in their employment, and in
doing so, most would find enough Americans to keep their business
running. "You hear the myth so much that immigrant farmworkers take
jobs Americans won't do, that Americans won't clean the streets, clean
the rooms, wash the dishes," says economist Marshall Barry of the Labor
Research Center of Boston and Miami. "But that isn't true. If you pay
right, Americans will do everything."
Like many
immigration-advocacy organizations,
Reason magazine opposes
cutting foreign admissions, fearing that the action would cause
increases in the wages of janitors, busboys, waitresses, cooks, maids,
nannies, farmworkers, and all sorts of other laborers. To
Americans with a more populist perspective, of course, raising
wages would be great news. It would be a comforting thought that the
people doing those jobs would not have to risk poverty at every turn.
The rest of us might have to pay a little more for some goods and
services, but we would be living in a more just society, as well as one
in which more people were able to pay their own way without welfare or
draining other social services. It is possible, however, that we might
not end up paying anything extra for the privilege of living in a
society where lower-skill workers earn a decent wage. A study by two
Princeton economists, David Card and Alan Krueger, provides some
insight. When New Jersey raised its minimum wage by nearly 20 percent
in 1992, the scholars had a case study on their hands. In New Jersey
restaurants, for example, they found that the higher pay did not cause
prices to rise. Using better personnel practices that reduced turnover
and improved productivity, the restaurants offset the higher wages.
Robert Kuttner commented
that the study seemed to show that the employers could have been paying
higher wages all along; "they simply chose not to, given that enough
workers were available at the lower wage.”3
Denying businesses their
stream of cheap new foreign labor would jolt many of them out of a
counterproductive complacency about worker productivity, and market
forces would drive today's so-called immigrant jobs to improvement back
to being "jobs Americans will do."
A journey across the
country may be the strongest rebuttal to claims that large numbers of
tasks wouldn't get done without immigrants. If indeed the
occupations filled by foreign workers in high-immigration areas can be
done only by foreign workers, then that should be true throughout the
United States. But, as my two sons were surprised to learn when they
were younger, it is not true. Living on the East Coast, where
immigration is higher than the American average, both of them became
accustomed to certain types of service and manual labor jobs being
filled primarily by immigrants. So when we ventured inland-a hundred
miles usually was far enough-they consistently were surprised to find
English-speaking, native-born Americans in every one of those so-called
immigrant jobs: convenience store clerks, fast-food workers,
blacktoppers, busboys, motel maids, landscapers.
Copyright
© 1996, W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. Click
here to read the entire book by Roy Beck.
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