The Wall Street Journal has a really good story today on the government discouraging companies from hiring foreign workers.
First of all, it’s news. I’ve seen part of this, but the Journal is smart to piece together what looks like a larger trend. Second of all, the reporter, S. Mitra Kalita, does a nice job bringing balance to what’s always a hot-button topic.
The government is restricting highly skilled hires, is requesting that seasonal employers hire fewer foreigners, and is talking about suspending a farmhand guest worker program. Seems logical, right? With an unemployment rate above 8 percent (European levels!) and rising sharply every month, it seems we should give our folks first dibs.
the U.S. finds its longstanding quandary over immigration growing even more difficult. On one hand, fewer Americans have jobs and competition for available work is intensifying. On the other, the Obama administration says it wants to resist moves toward protectionism — at least in the trade of goods and services…
Immigration advocates say it is hypocritical not to apply the same approach to the flow of people.
“You don’t abandon regulations because you have one bad year,” said Jeanne M. Malitz, an immigration lawyer in San Diego who represents many growers who are trying to plan their harvests but are uncertain of their labor source.
Now, a lot of stories, like in, say, The New York Times would have left it right here with this comment:
Some farms, Ms. Malitz said, are seeing U.S. applicants for the first time in years, but remain apprehensive. “Will they stay?” she asks. “They quit in the middle of the season. They don’t like it.”
But Kalita does a good job of questioning that (which is an age-old Chamber of Commerce line):
Indeed, an economic downturn tests an argument that has been the bedrock of legal, employer-sponsored migration: Americans won’t or can’t do certain jobs. Among the highly skilled, perhaps they didn’t know programming languages such as Java or C++. Among the lower skilled, they didn’t want to work with their hands, get dirty, or sweat.
And finding that it’s already changing in some place:
t the Bitterroot Ranch in Dubois, Wyo., owner Bayard Fox said the dude ranch has sponsored equestrians from the U.K. and France, and cooks and housekeepers from Germany, under a summertime J-1 visa — intended for foreign college students and trainees. But he doesn’t plan to do that this year. Business is off, he said, and for a change there are enough Americans applying for jobs.
The line of reasoning that “Americans won’t do certain jobs”, most memorably put by John McCain’s incredibly out-of-touch assertion that Americans wouldn’t pick lettuce for $50 an hour, is a canard meant to justify paying menial laborers less. The people who argue this are the ones who yammer on about the “hand of God” and the like. Sure, not many Americans are going to want to do stoop labor for $6.55 an hour when they can work in an air-conditioned McDonald’s for that. As you increase the wage for a crappy job, you get more native applicants. Lax immigration policies increase the pool of labor, driving pay down.
But it’s not that simple, of course, as Kalita smartly points out. Businesses have to compete. Here’s a crab-meat processor in Maryland:
Jack Brooks is the rare employer who calls himself “desperate to find people.” Every year, the co-owner of the century-old J.M. Clayton Co. in Cambridge, Md., has relied on a dozen seasonal guest workers, mostly from Mexico, to pick the meat out of Maryland blue crabs all day long, March till November. But H-2B visas, as they are known, were all exhausted this year. So Mr. Brooks is trying to find Americans to do the job…
Critics of the visa programs blame sponsors for driving down wages. Mr. Brooks said he offered the no-show hire an entry-level salary of $6.71 plus some incentives by piece and pound, and the potential to double her salary with experience.
Many anti-immigrant americans complain of undocumented immigrant
workers accepting low wages thus resulting in unfair competition
in the job market. They are even blamed them for the downward
trend of pay rates to very low levels. Solution? Regularize
these workers so they can join the unions. Surely, they'd rather
have $18/hr instead of $8/hr. Another complaint is they are
draining the welfare coffers of the federal government by
becoming a social burden. Solution? Legalize them so they can
pay ss/medicare and income taxes. If 10 million undocumented
workers pay payroll and income taxes and property taxes, that
would be billions of dollar going into government coffers.
Terrorists, druggists, smugglers, criminals, be they citizens or
immigrants have there place in jail. But hardworking people
seeking the american dream should be treated with respect and
dignity. America is a nation of immigrants. Even native
americans have accepted the presence of immigrants in this land.
But many have forgotten that our ancestors came from other lands
in search of the american dream.
#1 Posted by true american patriot, CJR on Fri 27 Mar 2009 at 09:39 AM
The only thing the story is missing is something about the effect on immigrants and migrant workers.
#2 Posted by Chris Corliss, CJR on Fri 27 Mar 2009 at 11:55 AM
true american patriot said
"Many anti-immigrant americans complain of undocumented immigrant
workers accepting low wages thus resulting in unfair competition
in the job market. They are even blamed them
for the downward trend of pay rates to very low levels. Solution? Regularize
these workers so they can join the unions. Surely, they'd rather have $18/hr instead of $8/hr."
On the same note, if the illegal immigrant were not here, the rates would go up also. After several well publicized "raids", the companies that had a large "illegal" workforce had people coming to fill these jobs in droves. The law of supply and demand was proven here. Take away the number of available workers, demand rises and so do wages. You are really doing your fellow Americans a disservice when you try to picture the illegal immigrant actually making things better for the native worker. It doesn't. Because even if the native worker is not competing with the illegal immigrant, with most being low wage earners who bring their families over, we are stuck with subsidizing their eduation, medication and even imprisonment, in some cases. Cheap labor isn't cheap. So get rid of the Cheap labor and wages will rise and you will not have to deal with the problems that poor and illiterate illegal immigrants bring with them.
#3 Posted by Edie, CJR on Fri 27 Mar 2009 at 12:51 PM
Immigration is a modern phenomenon. It owes its existence to the needs of an ever more intensely integrated global capitalist economy to have people move around for the purpose of work, for reproduction of labor power (studies, particularly higher and more specialized forms of knowledge) or political asylum across the borders of an increasingly obsolete inter-state system. Immigrants are people who obtain legal status marked, at a minimum, by some form of residence permit that regulates the terms of their employment (see also expatriates). Some, but by no means all, foreign workers and expatriates seek and reach citizenship in the state where they work. Immigrants are different from the undocumented labor force in that the latter does not have legal status in the country in which s/he works. (There can be a host of complex reasons for lack of legal status: lack of interest on part of the worker, the state's refusal to grant such permits to categories of foreign workers, institutional racism, etc.) Not all undocumented workers are, strictly speaking, illegal: Because of the complex history of global migrations, several powerful states, such as the United States, Canada, etc. have had legal systems in which work without explicit consent of the state has fallen through legal "cracks." Both immigrants and undocumented workers differ from tourists as the latter do not engage in income earning activities in the countries they visit, so their economic impact is restricted mainly to consumption and environmental consequences. Seasonal labor migration is often treated in the press and in political rhetoric as a form of immigration.
http://www.migration.org.au/
#4 Posted by migration laws, CJR on Sat 28 Mar 2009 at 07:56 AM
Stories of this sort are always falsely predicated on two assumptions:
1. Employers pay immigrants less.
2. American citizens work as hard as immigrants.
The first predicate is false in many cases. Many employers are willing to pay ANYBODY (immigrant or not) a fair wage for fair work, and that's where the second predicate enters in:
Americans are lazy.
Throughout this country's history, the immigrant workforce has been hard-working. A common axiom amongst many employers: Hire a first-generation immigrant--they're hard workers.
Talk to any businessperson who hires lower-level employees: They will virtually all tell you that it's nearly impossible to find a worker who possesses a work ethic. "The American Work Ethic" is now too often seen only in immigrants.
#5 Posted by DamnedLiberal, CJR on Mon 30 Mar 2009 at 12:20 AM