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Illegal Immigration
First of all, let me emphasize: illegal immigration. Legal immigrants have
done what the law requires: filled in forms, paid absurd amounts of money, waited in
line--while illegal immigrants have skipped the line, by sneaking across the border.
One of my co-workers is a legal immigrant. He wears a T-shirt that asks,
"What part of illegal didn't you understand?"
The federal government is doing a lackluster job of enforcing federal immigration
laws. Idaho needs to do what it can.
Last year, Arizona
passed a law punishing employers who knowingly hired illegal immigrants--and it is
beginning to work. Illegal immigrants are packing up and leaving. While employers
are challenging the law, the
9th Circuit Court of Appeals has allowed prosecutions to go forward in the meantime.
There are several reasons why the Idaho legislature should take steps to
stop illegal immigration:
- While the vast majority of illegal immigrants who come to America are hard
working people looking for a job, there are some who are not. In some cases, they
are criminals who could not survive a background check--and might end up in prison
back home, if they were deported.
- The vast majority of illegal immigrants are not terrorists, or even from
nations that have been a source of terrorists. But there are illegal immigrants
from various parts of the Middle East who do get captured on our borders. Perhaps
they are just economic refugees--but why take a chance? As long as hundreds of
thousands of illegal immigrants cross our borders every year, it is trivial for
a few hundred terrorists to hide inside that stream. Reducing the illegal immigrant
river to a trickle makes it easier to spot those whose intentions are destructive.
- Illegal immigrants are overwhelmingly poorly educated and unskilled or
semiskilled laborers. They are competing with American citizens and legal residents
who are also poorly educated and with limited job skills. As long as there are
more unskilled workers than unskilled jobs, employers can and will lower the wages
that they pay.
If illegal immigrants were driving down the wages of lawyers, doctors,
engineers, and other well-paid professionals, it would be unfortunate, but not
tragic. Illegal immigration drives down the wages of Americans who can least
afford it--those who are struggling to get by. I don't expect that stopping
illegal immigration is going to dramatically improve the financial condition of
the poorest Idahoans--but if we can help raise the wages of the poorest Idahoans
by enforcing the law against illegal immigration--why not?
Apologists for illegal immigration insist that improving the wages of the
poorest Americans is going to make food and services expensive. This is simply
not the case, because labor is a very small part of the cost of the food and
services that we consume.
As example, consider a head of lettuce.
Idaho's minimum wage is
increasing on July 24, 2008 to $6.55 per hour. Farm workers don't spend even a
minute picking, washing, sorting, and packaging that head of lettuce for
shipment to a store--so a head of lettuce has at most 11 cents of labor in it
right now. If removing illegal immigrants from the labor pool increased the
wages of agricultural workers to $10 per hour (which is unlikely), what would
that do to the cost of a head of lettuce at the grocery store? It would now
have no more than 17 cents of labor in it. The same is true for meals in a restaurant:
there just isn't that much labor cost in a meal.
- Until the 1880s, the United States was one of the major source of inventions
worldwide. Why? Partly because of our patent system--which was quite innovative--
but partly because labor was in short supply. A lack of farmworkers meant that we invented
the mechanical reaper, replacing backbreaking work with the better job of running
the machine. Ditto for the sewing machine, the dishwasher, and dozens of other
devices that have freed unskilled and semiskilled laborers from disagreeable jobs.
Why hasn't American ingenuity been set to work on mechanizing miserable jobs like
picking fruits and vegetables? Because illegal immigrants drive the cost of labor
so low that it doesn't make sense to develop those machines. Higher labor costs
will almost certainly drive the next wave of invention--freeing people from jobs
that really should be done by machines.
- Because illegal immigrants are so poorly paid--and very seldom have health
insurance from their employer--they end up being a drain on public hospitals.
In states where illegal immigration is more of a problem, this is causing
some public hospitals to either increase what they charge paying customers, or
shut down. We haven't reached that point yet, but it is a real danger.
I don't blame the illegal immigrants for this. Employers of illegal immigrants
are taking advantage of our generosity, by sticking the taxpayers with the bills
for health care. There is a big enough problem with uninsured American citizens
and legal residents; this has to stop.
- Requiring employers to abide by the existing laws about illegal immigration
will improve the economic conditions of those Americans who are struggling to
get by every month, reduce the public hospital burden on taxpayers--and probably
encourage development of the next generation of robots. Let's do it.
Employers are already subject to fines under federal law for knowingly hiring
illegal immigrants--but the federal government has not shown sufficient interest
in enforcing the law. Idaho can pass a similar ban on knowingly hiring
illegal aliens, and make the cost high enough that illegals will soon figure out
that they need to return home.
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