Illegal Immigration Depresses Wages for American Workers

Parent Cafe
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<p>Supporters of the boycott have made no secret of their determination to try to shut down schools, businesses and entire cities. Much of Los Angeles’ 7th Street produce market, which supplies thousands of local restaurants and markets, is closed today. Many meat-packing companies like Cargill and Tyson are also closing many of their plants.</p>

<p>“The meat packers are confirming what we know,” says University of Maryland economics professor Peter Morici, “and that is that this large group of illegal aliens in the United States is lowering the wage rate of semiskilled workers, people who are high school dropouts or high school graduates with minimal training.”</p>

<p>In fact, a meat-packing job paid $19 an hour in 1980, but today that same job pays closer to $9 an hour, according to the Labor Department. That’s entirely consistent with what we’ve been reporting – that illegal aliens depress wages for U.S. workers by as much as $200 billion a year in addition to placing a tremendous burden on hospitals, schools and other social services.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/05/01/dobbs.immigrantprotests/index.html[/url]”>http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/05/01/dobbs.immigrantprotests/index.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Those lower wages keep food affordable for everyone.<br>
The other end of the argument on benefits, etc. is very complex and it may be costly or a wash depending on the assumptions.</p>

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<p>Keep fo0d affordable? What happened to promoting a livable wage for everyone? There are people who are not Hispanic who make less than $10 a day. I don’t care if food increases. If people have the money to shop, this would not even be a problem. Remember, majority of Americans (except high-status professionals and CEOs) have declining real incomes because we don’t increase minimum wage or pay people the right salary to inflation.</p>

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<p>LOL - keeping food affordable.</p>

<p>Would the price of food double if wages went from $9/hour to $19/hour? No. There are many, many other costs associated with food - the non-labour costs of farming and growing food; raw materials; storage; processing; shipping; and properly storing the food in the supermarket.</p>

<p>What - maybe a 10% increase in food prices? Sounds like it would hurt the lower classes, but wouldn’t their wages, in the aggregate, increase far more than that?</p>

<p>Yes, illegal immigration hurts our country. We have a MINIMUM WAGE for a reason. If we want to get rid of it, we should do so by law but not this method.</p>

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<p>Many of the items on this list involve labor. A lot of the illegal laborers as a matter of fact work at harvesting the fruits and vegetables that grace our tables. This is why big (agri) business is supporting the protesters.</p>

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<p>Cherry workers here make around $12 an hour. If you want a job, just show up. (I will PM names and addresses of 10 farms currently hiring to anyone who will seriously make the effort to go there.) Probably true that immigrant labor (not necessarily “illegal” labor, as much of the the labor force in Washington is now “settled out” and is second generation) has indeed kept wages “depressed”, though it hasn’t lowered them at all (there aren’t any non-immigrants taking the jobs.) Take them out of the equation, and expect wages for cherry and apple pickers would be roughly $25/hr. (less for apples), but I still don’t think they’d find the labor force.</p>

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<p>“In fact, a meat-packing job paid $19 an hour in 1980, but today that same job pays closer to $9 an hour, according to the Labor Department.”</p>

<p>Where else did you find factory jobs paying $19 an hour in 1980 - probably $50 in 2006 dollars? Probably in the automotive sector. Draw the parallel about those high paying jobs today. No need to fear the $9 paid in the US to willing and able workers, but the $1 or $4 paid in Mexico and China to even more willing workers. </p>

<p>Salaries paid to undocumented workers might depress wages, but ridiculously high wages extracted by all-too-powerful and belligerent unions kill entire domestic industries. Politics may all be local, but the economy is global. The imes when an average factory worker in the US could expect to earn 10 times more than his neighboors for no good reason but a geographical luck of the draw is … irrevocably over. The expectation of everybody in the US being high middle class and able to load its WalMart cart with with dirt cheap good s made by starving foreigners is equally one of the past.</p>

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<p>“Take them out of the equation, and expect wages for cherry and apple pickers would be roughly $25/hr. (less for apples), but I still don’t think they’d find the labor force.”</p>

<p>For a parallel, some of the best peaches in North America are picked in the ciy of Nuevo Casas Grandes in the State of Chihuahua. Their product is vastly superior to what american growers export to Mexico. Wages paid to the workers are all below $2 per hour, and there is no shortage of workers. Companies from south of the border have access to the same technology, the same access to land, and plenty of labor. The only difference is that their access to the largest market in the world is somewhat restricted by highly divisive battles over phyto-sanitary conditions. However, none of the two camps can operate in a vaccum. Increase the salaries by a wide margin in the US, and the neighboring countries will react to a market yielding higher prices in the grocery stores.</p>

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<p>We’ll see how this unfolds over the next few days.</p>

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<p>I have no support for the artificial “living wage” theory. That’s what happened to it. See what excessive “living wages” are doing to France and other countries right now.</p>

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<p>Then we’re at least in partial agreement.</p>

<p>I don’t agree with LIVING wages, but I do agree with a minimum wage. They are different things, despite the assertions by the left that they should be the same.</p>

<p>Only about 2% of minimum wage earners are over the age of 25. That is the primary reason why I’m the first to get up in arms about people who say that you can’t support a family of four on a minimum wage salary, 40 hours a week. I’ll get blasted for this - but why have two kids and a stay-at-home mom on minimum wage? </p>

<p>I think that a living wage in most parts of the country would be about $10/hour. That’s double minimum wage - but, realistically, only the very unskilled work minimum hours.</p>

<p>Marite - yes, a lot of that involves labour; however, I really doubt that the Star Market down the street employs illegals. There’s only a small part of that portion that is directly attributable to illegal workers. The absurd proposition advanced by those who say that we need illegals for our economy is that food was not affordable for anyone save the wealthy before our country was flooded with illegal aliens. Not buying it.</p>

<p>I’m a big believer in the free market. If someone gave me enough money, I would pick fruit for 40 hours a week.</p>

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<p>Aries:</p>

<p>Star Market may not employ illegals, but packing and processing companies very likely do. As well, there was an item on CNN a few days ago that suggested the biggest number of illegals are employed by individual householders. </p>

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How much would be enough money?</p>

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Enough. Somewhere, there’s a dollar figure on that. Depending on other aspects of the job (benefits, time - could you moonlight on a farm instead of at a bar?), it would vary - but the fact is, VERY few people would not pick fruit if enough money were involved. Not to be crass or flippant, but it’s not prostitution, life-threatening, or doing kill contracts for the Mafia.</p>

<p>Give people enough money for a moral job (or at least one that isn’t immoral) and they will do it.</p>

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<p>In eastern Washington, where the cherry and apple orchards are, there is 8% unemployment. With the exception of Hispanic immigrants - both legal and illegal - virtually everyone else is white. There are probably 20,000 white unemployed folks, many of them young, strapping post-high school students or high school dropouts. And there are jobs begging in the cherry orchards for roughly $12/hour.</p>

<p>But they won’t take 'em. Too hard! I don’t think many of you have any idea how hard the work is. (and, in pesticide-spraying season, how dangerous.) </p>

<p>Many of the migrants have now settled out, but are still employed in the orchards. They don’t depress wages though. Cherries are the “riverboat” gamble of the fruit industry. You get one big year, and then four bad ones (rain, hail, too much sun, too little, or just at the wrong time), and you do okay. You get one biggie and five bad ones and you go bankrupt. Get rid of the Hispanic workers, and wages DON’T go up. The cherries simply don’t get picked. Doesn’t pay to bring 'em to market.</p>

<p>Apples are a little bit different, mainly because the housing requirements for apple workers are such that there is a substantial investment in infrastructure, and the costs of maintaining that infrastructure are high enough that wages (which are lower than in cherries or other stone fruit) are lower, and there is a longer picking/packaging season (in cherries, on particular farms, it may be as short as 6 days, and workers have to be nimble, and amateur meteorologists in figuring out where to go for their next jobs.) There are a few college students that will go apple picking, though they are mostly disappeared at this point. But anyone want a job, just PM me.</p>

<p>There is now an apple glut, though. China is now growing its own apples, and exporting to Japan, majorly eating into the market for Washington apples. Wages are depressed by market conditions, not by migrant workers. Pay wouldn’t rise if they disappeared. Same is generally true in the berry (blue berry and raspberry) and asparagus markets, except in this case it isn’t that foreign markets are drying up, but that imports are so cheap.</p>

<p>And take the migrants out of the local economy, and local businesses go bankrupt as well. There will be LESS white employment, not more; wages will go DOWN for local white workers, not up.</p>

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<p>Of course. But would you and I be able to afford or willing to buy goods at the prices that would result from the kind of wages you envision?</p>

<p>As of 2002, “In Cambodia for example, the majority of workers in garments and textiles receive just a minimum wage, which is currently US$45 per month.”
<a href=“403 Forbidden”>403 Forbidden;

<p>$45 is what my handyman charges per hour. Unlike the illegals profiled in the CNN news item a couple of days ago, he is American-born.</p>

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<p>I picked fruit when I was in junior high for money for school clothes for a couple summers- I wasn’t tall enough to pick blueberries at the Overlake blueberry farm, so I rode an old school bus outsome where and picked strawberries-the fields were full of kids- who else wants to crawl around in the dirt?
I also have stories of friends working at canneries to earn money for college, and in a corn processing plant, they were boring, tedious jobs, but they paid pretty well, I sure preferred picking strawberries to my other job “babysitting”. Earning a few hundred dollars for a couple weeks work was pretty good for a kid, considering babysitting just paid $.50 an hour.
as far as goods and services go- I think we consume too damm much, it wouldn’t kill us not to buy new junk just because we have money burning a hole in our pocket.
and mini- I would go to wenatchee and pick cherries but I have asthma and I don’t imagine the chemicals would do it any good.( which is why I only buy local organic- I don’t need to pay money to have someone else get sprayed for me)</p>

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<p>Mini: do you mean apple picking for fun? In New England, everyone goes apple picking. There’s a few weeks when it’s apple pie, apples in Nutella, and apples in salad.</p>

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<p>No - apple picking for real work! (It’s not like New England.)</p>

<p>But the main point is that if migrant labor disappeared, white employment would go down - stores would go bankrupt all over the place, and in some places real estate would collapse. Doctors would close up shop (in our state, undocumented workers are on Medicaid), as would hospitals which would no longer have the necessary volume to remain in business.</p>

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<p>Great insights, Mini.</p>

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<p>I hope you’ve grown a bit since the days when you were not tall enough to pick from a blueberry bush</p>