Jobs: Wanted and Unwanted

Chris Hayes complains:

There are few things that irk me more than when conservatives advocate for increased immigration for low wage workers by saying that immigrants do jobs that Americans don’t want. I don’t want to buy a slice of pizza for $45. It doesn’t mean I don’t like pizza! I’m not particularly interested in writing a book for the total payment of $9. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to write a book!

Raise. The. Wages. You’ll find plenty of workers. I promise.

There are, however, two sides to this. You oftentimes find immigrants working in low margin businesses where the business itself would be non-viable if the wages were substantially higher. All the people who serve pizza in my neighborhood are immigrants. That's not because no native-born people are "willing" to work serving slices of pizza. As Chris says, pay them enough and people will apply for the jobs. But on the other hand, if you're going to have to compensate your work force generously, it doesn't really make sense to have them selling something as cheap as a slice of pizza. You could raise prices but, as Chris says, nobody wants to pay a ton for a pizza. More likely, you're going to want to get into a higher margin business.

In a very intuitive sense, if you raise wages by restricting the labor supply, you're going to wind up reducing the total amount of work that gets done in the economy. It's not that each and every low-skill job that currently exists will become better-compensated. Rather, a number of those jobs proportional to the number of people who've been removed from the labor force -- most likely the ones where labor costs are the largest proportion of the total cost of the product -- will disappear. The remaining ones will then pay higher wages than they used to, and consumers will consume fewer labor-intensive goods

Comments

What's this? Some actual economic analysis instead of redistribute-the-spoils populist rhetoric? Wow. You're going to get lambasted in the comments soon, that's for sure.

Posted by Keith M Ellis | August 27, 2007 2:42 PM

Matt,

Here's the flaw in your argument: cracking down on illegal immigrants won't constrict the labor supply as much as you might expect, because there are unemployed Americans who will rejoin the work force when employers can no longer hire more servile illegal aliens. For example, we have double digit unemployment among teenagers in this country. A modest increase in wages combined with a paucity of illegal immigrants could mean teenagers fill some pizza delivery and restaurant jobs currently filled by illegals.

Another source of replacement workers for illegal aliens could be unemployed black men, particularly high school dropouts, whose labor force participation is quite low relative to other groups. Busboy jobs in the NYC metro area pay about $10 per hour, and yet I can't remember the last time I've seen a black busboy. Are they simply unwilling to work for $10 per hour because they don't need the money or are restaurateurs unwilling to give black men a shot when they can hire docile Mexicans instead? Let's find out, before we continue to bleed Medicaid and other social service budgets on illegal aliens.

Posted by Fred | August 27, 2007 2:52 PM

Sheesh. That sure is vague. A 'ton' for pizza??

Are you suggesting that is pizza servers were paid a buck an hour more your pizza would no longer be affordable? How much is that a slice? A dime? How about two bucks? Pizza will not vanish from DC if the server is paid a living wage.

All this is akin the BS anti-minimum wage arguments.

Posted by Nat | August 27, 2007 2:55 PM

An early scene in "The Man Who Would Be King" takes place in the office of an English colonial administrator in India. To stay cool, he had a big fan over his head flapped by a servant via a string attached to the servant's toe. That's pretty cool! If wages weren't so damn high here in America, I could have my own Untouchable toe-fanning servant too, instead of having to use my boring, totally uncool electric fan.

Think of all the other hundreds of millions of jobs that could be created in America if wages fell to 19th Century Indian levels!

Of course, I couldn't actually afford to pay my toe-fanning flunky the full cost of what it would take for him and his family to live in America, but I believe the externalities of my servant's existence should be borne by the rest of the public, not by me. Thus, my worker's kids should get free schooling, the whole family should get free health care at the emergency room, he should drive without car insurance, etc. Why shouldn't I cost shift my conveniences on to everybody else?

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 27, 2007 2:55 PM

Fred's right, oddly neither of you would probably be making the same argument if we were talking about raising the minnimum wage, which per your example is essentially the same thing.

And yes Matt, pizza places exist without immigrant labor, poke your head in one the next time you're in Maine.

Posted by AJ | August 27, 2007 3:00 PM

So if you don't raise wages, there will be a bunch of Americans who can't get jobs that pay more than $10 an hour. If you raise wages, some jobs will disappear so there will be a bunch of Americans who can't get jobs that pay more than $10 per hour, but there will be some that do. I think most Americans would prefer the latter.

Posted by Ben | August 27, 2007 3:01 PM

For some reason we don't have a lot of undocumented workers of any origin in this smaller metropolitan area, pizza joints are staffed with the usual mix of college students, high school students, single moms, and actors, pizza joint wages (post probationary periond) range from $8 - $12 (and more for experienced cooks), pizzas around here DON'T cost $45, and 3 new pizza places have opened recently just in my neighborhood.

I think there are major, major assumptions about the relationship between minimum wage, employment, and prices in Matthew's (and Ezra's) analysis that are not born out by experience outside NY, Chicago, and LA (where the restaurant business clearly does depend on undocumented workers).

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | August 27, 2007 3:07 PM

But suppose that all employers the fast food business in your neighborhood were forced to raise wages; say there were some kind of "minimum wage" that was increased. Would that, in fact, cause price increases, demand shifts, and falling demand for labor (ie unemployment) that you describe? Apparently not, as Card and Kreuger demonstrated in their famous study from the early 1990s. Indeed, their work suggested that if anything a (modest) wage increase might even increase employment in the fast food business. The fact that a business is low margin doesn't tell us anything about how much it can afford to increase wages: if the wage increase is uniform across the relevant industry or market, and if at least some of the resulting increase in workers income is recaptured through their consumption of the industry's products, then it is certainly possible that a wage increase would be associated with an increase in employment in a low-margin industry. You can't just read off a reliable conclusion from a simplistic model

Posted by Rich C | August 27, 2007 3:11 PM

It seems doubtful that I want to be a lettuce picker simply because for the kind of astronomical sum that would destroy the lettuce industry I would be willing to do it.

But Matt is certainly more right than his critics here in asserting that these things work on margins, and there are jobs which would disappear if the labor costs got too high (I remember some years back a proposed Burger King in Framingham Mass that was turned down by the town on the grounds that the supply of workers for that kind of business were already too stretched).

In practice it is hard to know where the margins are though. And the person on the wrong side of such arguments tends to be the person who claims to know a priori that such and such a mood would have such and such an effect simply because it is the type of mood it is.

The most common kind of fallacy one sees of this type is the inane argument that if raising the minimum wage a dollar is a good idea, then why not raise it 20 dollars. Given shifting margins, only trial and error is ever going to let you know what the actual tradeoffs are to this kind of thing.

Posted by Lon | August 27, 2007 3:13 PM

Re "In a very intuitive sense, if you raise wages by restricting the labor supply, you're going to wind up reducing the total amount of work that gets done in the economy."
-----------
Oh bullshit. I remember a similar argument advanced by Southern Plantation Owners re why it wasn't economically feasible to abolish slavery.
Probably along the line that a T-shirt would cost $1000 if they had to pay white trash to pick cotton --instead of die in wars.

What raising wages does is encourage capital investment into highly productive automation that provides high paying jobs. Instead of sweating laborers worked to exhaustion, you have robots and human overseers/repairmen. Which greatly improves the economy.

It's no mistake that US technological innovations and the US economy has greatly declined in the past 20 years as America's capitalists have --with Congressional tax incentives -- moved US capital out of the USA in pursuit of low cost labor.

Low cost labor investments that require a roughly $1 TRILLION per YEAR subsidy -- i.e., our military budget --to protect them. Something the defenders of globalization and mass immigration are careful to not discuss. Just as they are equally careful to not mention that the profits of empire follow to a superrich few--while the heavy costs are dumped off onto the common citizen.

As I've noted before, the intellectual integrity of our professional economist class is best summed up as "He whose bread I eat his song I sing".

Posted by Don Williams | August 27, 2007 3:14 PM

In the Southern construction industry, the wages are important but the productivity is a bigger factor. The immigrants here work so much faster the company owners are making far more money than previously without reduced wages. I wonder how much of the productivity increases over the last 10 years can be attributed to the increased percentage of immigrant labor.

Posted by Th | August 27, 2007 3:16 PM

Matt's comments, like many of the ignorant masses, assumes that a significant portion of a product's price is wages...it's amazing that people can remain so woefully ignorant.

For example:

A product I sell, the total labor content including packaging is 2.6% of the total price, with the new packaging I am developing we should be able to lower that labor cost to 0.74% [packaging is the single largest labor cost]. Now I could move all of production to China to avoid the packaging labor cost, or I could get off my lazy ass and come up with a more efficient packaging system that looks better. One methodology requires only greed, the other thought and hard work.

Cheap labor is the refuge of the lazy and stupid.

Posted by S Brennan | August 27, 2007 3:17 PM

Matt seems to be fumbling and bumbling his way toward the concept of market clearing prices. Funny he didn't run into that concept while at Harvard.

Posted by kafka | August 27, 2007 3:23 PM

Lon,

You have to look at the social costs as well. A landscape contractor might be slightly worse off if he has to hire two part-time teenagers at $12 per hour instead of one full-time illegal at $11 per hour, but American taxpayers are better off. The teenagers are probably already covered by their parents' health insurance, and if not, we are already responsible for their health care (via Medicaid, emergency rooms, etc.), so there isn't an additional social cost to employing them. On the other hand, if an illegal migrates here from Mexico to take that landscaper job, we have just incurred additional social costs, including his health care.

Posted by Fred | August 27, 2007 3:25 PM

I know this is slightly off topic, but in many of these discussions about wages/immigration, the discussion is typically focused around mexican-american immigrants, both legal and illegal, but within that discussion it seems like nobody talks much about the domestic failures of Mexico itself. Its kind of written off as a given.

In that same vein, I don't see much complaint about waves of illegals coming in from Canada. If anything it's americans looking for refuge there.

Anyway, what I am getting at is that we treat Mexico like a sovereign nation when it seems like we are underwriting their economy and a large percentage of their social programs. Stating this fact more openly, or at least seeing that Mexico provide opportunities and care for its own citizenry would seem the smart way to handle immigration.

Posted by Thunderlips | August 27, 2007 3:26 PM

Thunderlips,

You mean like this:

Mexico is a fabulously wealthy country. Few in countries in the world are better off in natural wealth and industrious people.

If people who say they cared about Mexicans well being really did [and in my estimation...they don't], they would ask the obvious question between the disconnect of the poverty of the people and the wealth of the Mexican nation.

For far too long elites in both Mexico and the United States have created deals that impoverish both it's peoples in an effort to enrich themselves. For far too long we have looked at the symptoms and confused them with the cause.

Isn't interesting that Mexico has the tax system the US elites want Americans to adopt? The root cause of Mexican poverty is bound tightly to the endemic corruption, the corruption stems from the fact that public servants are paid subhuman salaries, but in turn are allowed to prey on the people they are supposed to serve. The US elite does not call for reform, rather it props up the Mexican system. Why? Because..the elites of this country want the US to be more like Mexico. To borrow a phrase, the Mexican government knows it could be drowned in a bathtub and so it serves it conquistador masters with great care.

As ordinary US citizens, we have a stake in the Mexican tax structure just as we have in are own. If Mexico did not live so close to the United States, it would be clear that it is a failed state in all but name. This is not for some failing of the Mexican people, but because of the children of the conquistadors unsated greed.

As a common person, I am always disgusted by the ruling elites contempt for honor and duty. These people claim to be Christians and yet with every breath they spew contempt for Christ's Admonitions to the wealthy. How they can lack the vision to see that their life would be no worse, were they to [ever so lightly] put their shoulder to the wheel is beyond me.

Posted by: S Brennan | Aug 9, 2007 1:52:19 PM http://www.ezraklein.com/

Posted by S Brennan | August 27, 2007 3:38 PM

Re-engineer the jobs

The solution you don't mention is for employers to re-engineer their low wage jobs so that they are more productive, and can thus support a higher wage without eating into profits. The time and energy of even the lowest skilled worker would still be worth a lot more than the current minimum wage, if only employers were smart enough to design jobs that did better at using people's labor.

Posted by Glen Tomkins | August 27, 2007 3:40 PM

Interesting post. As a practical example, I come from a rural state where pizza is delivered by teenagers, lawn work is done by college students and the less intellectually-gifted or ambitious, and so is construction. Immigrants make it cheaper, obviously, but you are right that without immigrant labor many of these services would still get done, some would not, and they would all be a bit more expensive.

Posted by d | August 27, 2007 3:40 PM

Glen Tomkins:

The time and energy of even the lowest skilled worker would still be worth a lot more than the current minimum wage, if only employers were smart enough to design jobs that did better at using people's labor.

This reminds me of a wacky idea I had when I was a 15 year old making $4.25 per hour as a produce clerk in a supermarket. I usually finished the bulk of my work way before my shift was over. My thought was, instead of paying me $4.25 per hour to take four hours to do an hour's worth of work, why not pay me, say, $12 for that hour? The store would save money, and I could find more work elsewhere. Of course there are low wage jobs where you are actually working the whole time too.

Posted by Fred | August 27, 2007 3:47 PM

There is fundamentally no difference between protectionism for labor and protectionism for corn or sugar or steel. In the end, the losers are everybody.

With unemployment numbers hovering around the mid single digits, where are all these workers going to come from once we rid ourselves of the scourge of immigrant labor? The job market is and has been fundamentally strong for a pretty long time. An appeal to hire the remaining jobless Americans once the labor pool has shrunk is a sentence to scrape the bottom of the barrel with the least viable workers.

Posted by shecky | August 27, 2007 4:00 PM

In the Southern construction industry, the wages are important but the productivity is a bigger factor. The immigrants here work so much faster the company owners are making far more money than previously without reduced wages. I wonder how much of the productivity increases over the last 10 years can be attributed to the increased percentage of immigrant labor.

Have you seen drywall done by unskilled workers, which is what these low-cost immigrants always are? I will be surprised if many of these homes built in the South during this construction boom last more than 30 years.

Of course, technically that's a productivity improvement too if you look at it solely in terms of money made by the builders. The home builders get to build them again and make even more money! Sucks for the home buyers, however.

Posted by Walker | August 27, 2007 4:01 PM

I think pizza delivery was the wrong example, but I think Matt's point is valid in other areas. From a completely lay [i.e., non-economist] perspective, it seems pretty obvious to me that there are lots of jobs out there in service industries staffed largely by undocumented immigrants that simply wouldn't exist if there were not a pool of cheap labor.

When I was growing up in the middle class 'burbs, almost everybody mowed their own lawns, cleaned their own houses and cut their own toenails. Now, most people in my neighborhood have these services provided by very low wage labor. Some of this is the product of more women working, but not all of it. I think a lot more people would mow their own lawns if the monthly fee were $250 instead of $85, the current going rate around here, just as there would be a lot fewer nail salons if people had to pay $30 instead of $10 for a pedicure. There are services out there that people will pay for but, eventually, it will reach a point at which they will go without.

Posted by mert7878 | August 27, 2007 4:05 PM

There is one significant problem with low-wage labor that is often overlooked. The availability of low-wage labor makes it effective to substitute labor for equipment; therefore, it encourages primitive manufacturing and service practices, and discourages technological advance and automation.

The Greeks and Romans never had an industrial revolution. Why? The elites never needed it because they always had plenty of slaves. Why was the South an agrarian backwater for most of American history? Slavery and Jim Crow let the white elite lounge around on verandas rather than come up with ways to increase actual productivity per hour of work.

I'm firmly convinced that if we hadn't had a continuous flow of illegal immigrants into U.S. agricultural jobs for the last 25 years, we'd have fully automated harvests by now.

It should be noted that Japan is strongly anti-immigration, and, not so coincidentally, they are also at the forefront of robotics development.

I look forward to the day when machines do the jobs humans won't do.

Posted by Josh G. | August 27, 2007 4:05 PM

The notion of higher wages (or taxes, or exchange rates) "reducing the total amount of work done in the economy" implies something silly about what we call "work".

It takes work to mow my lawn. If I do it myself, that work doesn't contribute to "the economy"; if I hire someone to do it, it does. But it's work either way. Back in the 50's, one often hears, fewer women "worked". Ask your mother (if she was a housewife in the 50's) whether she agrees with _that_ one.

Posted by Tony P. | August 27, 2007 4:08 PM

dude, where do you get off saying this stuff? i mean where's the empirical evidence that what you say occurs with some regularity? you sound a bit too much like an econ-theorist.

Posted by matt | August 27, 2007 4:13 PM

"There is fundamentally no difference between protectionism for labor and protectionism for corn or sugar or steel."

First, deciding who gets to immigrate to your country isn't protectionism -- it's called having an immigration policy. We have one, but don't enforce it for unskilled workers. Second, corn, sugar, and steel are commodities, not people. People bring with them social costs (medical care, education for their children, law enforcement costs, etc.) that commodities do not. When these social costs are included, unskilled immigrants are net liabilities for this country.

"where are all these workers going to come from once we rid ourselves of the scourge of immigrant labor?"

Teenagers, high school dropouts, low-income black men, and other groups of Americans with high unemployment rates.

"An appeal to hire the remaining jobless Americans once the labor pool has shrunk is a sentence to scrape the bottom of the barrel with the least viable workers."

Nice use of alliteration -- are you a Starbucks barista, by any chance? There are already employers in America that are unable to hire illegals and so must scrape this "bottom of the barrel": Check your local DMV clerks or CVS cashiers. Better we let our "least viable" workers get jobs than import Mexico's least viable workers, and increase the burdens on Medicaid, law enforcement, education, etc.

Posted by Fred | August 27, 2007 4:23 PM

"Matt's comments, like many of the ignorant masses, assumes that a significant portion of a product's price is wages...it's amazing that people can remain so woefully ignorant."

Seems to me that you're the one being more than a bit arrogant here in assuming that labor is always the minor portion of a product's price. There are a whole bunch of industries where this isn't true, and they are those where the "manufacturing" occurs right at the retail level, as in restaurants. Whether the pizza industry is a good example or not, I don't know.

But maybe you ought to talk to a chef or kitchen manager and as him what are his food costs for a particular meal. Then take a guess on overhead and management salary, which is not going to be that large for something like a mom'n'pop pizza store. If labor isn't the majority cost in that case, there are others where it is.

So stop your sneering about other peoples' assumptions and ignorance, seeing as you're not doing so well yourself.

Posted by Keith M Ellis | August 27, 2007 4:29 PM

I wished this topic came up more.

It is indeed a ridiculous argument that no one would de these jobs....and in essence impliedly that certain things would just not get done.

This is America and I run across many many people looking for economic oppostunity everyday. To play off a few examples above, the practical reality is that if landscapers can't use cheap immigrant labor one of several things happens (any and all may apply):

(1) Other workers fill in (kids, unemployed or otherwise) and price may go up somewhat
(2) Some more people mow there own lawns and probably spend the money elsewhere (same effect)
(3) Someone invents a self propelled, or riding, or self operating mower......or another new technology to make it easier to maintain your lawn.
(4) And if its that hard to mow or pay for same, people pave their yards or put in a garden, a swimming pool or a baskertball court.

Posted by tom | August 27, 2007 4:36 PM

Here in Geneva the minimum wage is almost 4 time the US (something like $18-20/hour), strictly observed, and pizza is almost, I guess, twice more expensive than in the US. Nevertheless, people buy tons of pizza and unemployment is something like 3 or 4%. Go figure.

Posted by abb1 | August 27, 2007 4:53 PM

Walker; have you ever seen drywall hung by three drunk country boys?

Posted by Th | August 27, 2007 4:55 PM

abb1's comment reminds me of a ridiculous attempt at an invidious comparison of Switzerland to the U.S. made by Tom Friedman:

"Anybody out there try to become a Swiss citizen lately? It's not so easy — and it's also not an accident that Switzerland's most famous product is the cuckoo clock."

If only Switzerland had millions of Mexican immigrants, it might have the world's leading particle accelerator, world-leading financial and pharmaceutical companies, etc. Oh, wait... that's right, it does.

Thanks to abb1 though, we now know Switzerland is not without its problems -- the pizza is expensive.

Posted by Fred | August 27, 2007 5:08 PM

Th wrote: ... have you ever seen drywall hung by three drunk country boys?

Thanks for the laugh. I have. It ain't pretty. Same goes for laying carpet and house painting. Give me an ambitious immigrant over an entitled American any day.

Posted by mk | August 27, 2007 5:10 PM

Matt joins the "Libertarian lunatic fringe"!

Film at 11 - on Youtube.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | August 27, 2007 5:33 PM

While I certainly wouldn't dismiss MY's arguments out of hand---the exact shape of the supply/demand curve for labor is obviously an empirical question---unless I'm very sorely mistaken, they could equally well support a sharp reduction in the minimum wage, or even its complete elimination.

Maybe Rupert Murdoch's WSJ Ed Page has an opening for a new editorial writer...

Posted by RKU | August 27, 2007 6:04 PM

I don't mean to go all counterintuitive here, but Henry Ford started by selling cars on the lowest possible margin and paying his workers more than anyone else.

So it's probably a little more complicated than a slice of pizza would suggest.

Posted by serial catowner | August 27, 2007 6:45 PM

Matt seems to have overlooked the fact that with less workers out there seeking work, a drop in hiring because of higher wages doesn't have to cause more unemployment.

A simple example. Suppose with immigration we have 1.2 million bottow wage workers. The wage will adjust till that is the amount hired (a simplification, but one that gets the point across). Now through strict enforcement of the immigration laws, we reduce that to 1 million. Now at the wage that did exist, we have employers trying to hire 1.2 million people but now we also have only 1 million willing to work at that wage. Result, a labor shortage and wages go up. Let's say wages go up until bosses only want to hire 1.0 million workers now. In other words, .2 million jobs have disappeared because 'people don't want to pay a ton for pizza'. Has this made things worse for workers in America? Matt seems to be saying yes. I have to disagree, because as I started out by saying, he seems to have overlooked that less hiring at higher wages doesn't necessarily lead to unemployment when there are also fewer workers.

Posted by Counterfactual | August 27, 2007 6:47 PM

I agree with Yglesias that immigration is beneficial to our economy because they take the low paying jobs that help contribute to lower consumer prices. He helps to show the positive attributes of immigrants that many people tend to ignore or overlook.

Posted by Kerina | August 27, 2007 10:37 PM

I suppose my objection is more moral than economical (after all, slavery was a real boon to economic growth in the antebellum south), but try this idea on for size: full-blast immigration by the poorest, most desperate underclass of our downstairs neighbor is a Bad Thing because it (helps) makes Americans lazy and fat and unwilling to mow their lawns themselves. Getting away with hiring illegal immigrant also encourages petty criminality in our managerial class that manifests itself elsewhere.

It simply ruins the national work ethic for these immigrants' hard work to be rewarded with an unlivable wage that depresses the pay for everyone else at the bottom of the wage scale. People who are in serious competition for low wage jobs don't have the option of becoming computer engineers or biostatisticians or whatever the current beau ideal of professional manhood the culture is currently spewing out. How about instead of consigning our native underclass to prison or worse, telemarketing (or worst of all, prison telemarketing), we give them jobs doing real things and then pay them decently for it? (While we're on the topic, are any of you hiring?)

More seriously, I think that a lot of the phenomenon of jobs that Americans "won't take" comes down to cultural alienation rather than strictly wages - because they are dominated by a semi-alien culture (different language, mainly different ethnicity) at a certain saturation point, Americans won't apply (and managers won't hire them) because it isn't remotely possible to socially fit in with an entirely illegal immigrant workforce, and it's easier for management to deal with a workforce that speaks one language (Spanish).

BTW - I did my own damn drywall and it came out fine (well, the less said about the bathroom the better, but you get my drift). It isn't the hardest thing in the world to do, you silly passel of office girls.

Posted by JimDandy | August 28, 2007 12:03 AM

Fred,

The added social costs that you talk about in regards to immigrants from Mexico would not be a factor if their status was changed to legal. With legality, these immigrants are no longer consigned to the undocumentated and underground economy, making us better able to tax these immigrants and their employers, and making their tax contribution exceed the increased costs in social services that they require.

So while you are right that increased illegal immigration causes increases in social costs (for emergency health care, etc), it doesn't follow that the solution is try to reduce immigration (through erecting massive border walls & fences & other tactics that fall under a Prohibition paradignm). The solution instead is to change the character of such immigration from illegal to legal, and the best way to do that is remove the incentives present in current immigration law (such as nummerical limits on the total number of immigrants that are allowed into this country each year) for illegal immigration. If a person who simply wants to work in this country is prevented by our immigration laws from entering this country legally, and if there is a market for that person's labor, you create economic incentives via immigration law for illegal immigration. Remove the artificial limits on the supply of immigrant labor, and you remove the incentives for illegal immigration; the immigrants will still come, but they will come legally. When they come via legal channels, the problems associated with widespread illegal immigration disappear, since these immigrants will no longer be operating in the black market for labor.

Posted by eltoro | August 28, 2007 12:50 AM

Eltoro,

Those social costs are common to the unskilled, whether they are American citizens, legal residents, or illegal immigrants, so regularizing the status of current illegals wouldn't make those costs go away. Whether they become legal or not, the salient point is that they don't earn much, so they consume more in government social services than they pay in taxes.

For some numbers on this, see, for example, this study which examines the impact of unskilled illegals on the federal budget (they are also a drain on state budgets, of course):

Households headed by illegal aliens imposed more than $26.3 billion in costs on the federal government in 2002 and paid only $16 billion in taxes, creating a net fiscal deficit of almost $10.4 billion, or $2,700 per illegal household...

With nearly two-thirds of illegal aliens lacking a high school degree, the primary reason they create a fiscal deficit is their low education levels and resulting low incomes and tax payments, not their legal status[my emphasis] or heavy use of most social services.

The point I was making before is that we are already incurring these social costs with our native-born unskilled population; so it's better to employ them -- even for slightly higher wages -- than it is to import more poor, unskilled workers who will drain additional resources from Medicaid and other costly entitlement programs.

Posted by Fred | August 28, 2007 1:23 AM

We can choose to be a low wage country more and more like mexico, or we can choose to be the high value country, more like europe.were even low level jobs pay a reasonable wage.

Posted by Aaron | August 28, 2007 5:40 AM

If a business will go out of business given a regulatory scheme, it should go out of business. That's competition. If they can't pay the wages the market demands on the business they do, there is no real market for the product that they are selling. If a business can not be run for profit, and it's a public necessity, it should be run by the government.

It's amazing how many people who profess to love capitalism will refuse to accept the judgement of the market regarding their business.

Posted by soullite | August 28, 2007 8:29 AM

Speaking from Japan, we have very low immigration and there is also plenty of pizza available. It is not served by robots. And it is not outrageously expensive, either (maybe 1000-1500 yen per pizza).

Posted by Japanese pizza | August 28, 2007 9:46 PM

In Southern California you can drive by an automated carwash and usually see 5-10 Mexicans outside, waiting to wipe the last few remaining water droplets from the various SUV's and Mercedes. These guys are not adding to the overall welfare of the country, though their wages surely get counted in 'GDP'.

The neighbor two doors down hired a labor contractor Mexican, who in turn hired three Mexicans, to tear up his lawn -- they did it literally with picks and hoes over three days. It would have taken a guy with a rotortiller one day, and a guy with a Bobcat about two hours.

LA has a garment industry. Virtually all employers/owners are immigrants, as are the workers. LA is one of the most expensive cities in the world, housing-wise. It is the capital of the entertainment industry.

You see the problem. Some jobs shouldn't be done in the US. We don't need a garment industry, certainly not in LA. We don't need guys hanging out ready to wipe a a few water droplets, and we don't need three guys tearing up a lawn, when 20 years ago the homeowner and a rotortiller would suffice. And don't give me bull about free markets. These workers use roads, their kids use schools. Likely many receive subsidies of one sort or another.

Posted by Mitchell Young | August 29, 2007 1:53 AM

LA is full of "human signs," people paid to stand on the street and wiggle giant arrows in the direction of a real estate open house. It's a classic example of cheap labor / expensive land economy.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 29, 2007 2:25 AM

Imagine my surprise. I was in OK recently and it was full of Americans doing jobs that I've been told over and over again that Americans won't do.

This BS that the media is feeding us that we are inferior and deserve to be replaced by Latin Americans that will work for peanuts has another name. It's called ethnic cleansing.

Our leaders are completely corrupt. They support the immigration invasion that is destroying our country.

Posted by Tanstaafl | August 29, 2007 4:19 AM

What we have is an example of problem shifting: every solution comes with it's own set of problems, and each commenter's "solution" solves one set of problems but introduces its own new set.

So the question isn't "Which solution magically solves all our problems?" but rather "Which problems would we prefer to be stuck with?"

Take the landscaping jobs done by illegal laborers. Without the laborers many people would have to do their own (or, more likley, hire a 12-year-old kid). So they decide that saving 40 minutes every week is worth the costs of massive immigration, unaware that if it adds just 5 minutes a day to their commute time each way then they haven't saved any time at all (and they still have to pay the Mexican, and for the extra gas, as well).

Not to mention the fact that without 2 million new immigrants each and every year driving up the demand for (and hence cost of) housing (and adding to the number of undesirable neighborhoods) many people could afford to live a whole lot closer to work and still have a backyard for their children to play in.

So stop bitching about whose alleged solutions will solve every single problem - because there isn't one. Instead, decide which problems you'd prefer to have. I'll gladly cook my own food, pack my own lunch, mow my own lawn, and scrub my own toilets if I can have a better commute, lower taxes, a better environment, less crime and better, less crowded schools for my kids.

$5 for a slice of pizza? Pack a sandwich!

Posted by Craig | August 29, 2007 3:53 PM

You would do well to stop all the bologna about free markets in labor, too. Unlike immigrants, two heads of lettuce aren't about to give birth to a gaggle of kids who need Migrant Head Start, CHIP, public education, juvenile detention, or anything else. Governments at all levels use about 1/3rd of GNP every year. That "free market labor" of which you speak is being heavily, heavily subsidized by the taxpayers at large.

In fact, isn't the very purpose of a free market so that you don't have to move labor around - since you can move around production, instead?

Massive immigration is the exact opposite of a free amrket - it is a government subsidy to various powerful business and political interests.

Posted by Craig | August 29, 2007 4:07 PM

The unspoken motivation behind a lot of the pro-unskilled immigration people is the fantasy of replacing poor blacks with poor Mexicans. See, for example, yesterday's Wall Street Journal op/ed gushing about the Mexican illegals opening stores and running taco trucks in New Orleans. Of course, in reality, importing poor Mexicans doesn't make poor blacks go away; instead America gets to keep all the social costs of poor blacks and add the new social costs of poor Mexicans and their kids.

Posted by Harry | August 29, 2007 4:12 PM

I'm not going to pick on anyone in particular, but the distaste and dislike for lower class Americans displayed in the comments should make those folks ashamed.

Just for starters, the white trash in Iraq are almost all relatively high IQ high school graduates; that's what it takes to get into the Army these days. And not only that, in their ignorance they are likely patriotic and think that they are protecting their fellow citizens.

And then those, many many of them blacks, whose IQ is too low to get into the Army. Just what are they supposed to do? How about getting a high wage because labor is scarce because immigration is cut back? Then they can hold their head up and raise a family. And not be pushed into a life of crime. Or are you worried about them procreating if they are not in jail.

I'm just curious. Do you think you owe more to your fellow citizens than to foreigners? Do you think politicians have a moral obligation to those who elected them instead of to foreigners?

Think about it and don't act so morally superior.

Posted by Robert Hume | August 29, 2007 7:21 PM

El toro. Do you think that the US has a culture of its own? I think clearly that it does. If you replaced all US citizens by Africans or Chinese or South Americans would it be the same? Would the present US citizens suffer emotionally? Of course.

If you don't think so, just put yourself in the place of Mexicans who find themselves outnumbered in their own country say 2:1 by US citizens, or Chinese, or Africans. How would they feel?

Or how about black South Africans outnumbered 2:1 by Europeans or Chinese. Would they mind? Would they suffer?

The cultures of the world a precious creations ... not only to those who have created that culture, but also to all citizens of the world. They reflect the heritage of humanity, and mass immigration will destroy that heritage.

Posted by Robert Hume | August 29, 2007 7:30 PM

R. Hume,

You touch on a very good point.

Mass immigration affects us in a lot of ways. You can break them down into about 5 different categories: environmental, economic, quality of life, political, and cultural. In general it's acceptable to discuss the first 3 effects in "polite company," but the latter two have been ruled off limits by our modern-day McCarthyites. (How does a liberal feel to be called a McCarthyite, I wonder?)

You're not allowed to assume that whites becoming a minority will have any political or cultural impact on the destiny of this nation, and, if it does, then it has to be positive.

The only question I'd like to ask a person who complains that opposition to mass immigration is racist is this: How would you feel if, because of immigration, your ethnic/racial group were on its way to becoming the minority in Mexico (or Korea, India, China, Senegal, or whereever)?

The simple answer to that simple question (preferrably with them hooked up to a polygraph) is all you'd need to know. (Although given the immigration policies of Korea, Japan, Israel, India and pretty much every other country in the world, it's something we already know).

Race, ethnicity and religion affect politics and culture. It is naive and silly to assume otherwise. People have the right to ask whether they'd prefer to be stuck with those effects without being called nativists, racists, xenophobes or bigots. After all, it's the only country we have.

Posted by Craig | August 30, 2007 9:58 AM