How Does Immigration Impact American Labor?

. . . In the midst of the current economic crisis, growing numbers of Americans are being displaced by lower cost legal and illegal immigrant workers. Many businesses take advantage of illegal and cheap foreign labor as a way of reducing costs and increasing profits.

Of particular concern is the impact that continued large-scale importation of workers has on those Americans at the lower end of the socio-economic scale. According to the Current Population Survey (CPS), which is collected monthly by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in Fiscal Year 2008, 1.45 million new immigrants gained legal authorization to work in the United States. In addition to these new, legal foreign workers, The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that during that same year, 7.7 million illegal aliens were employed in the United States. Nationally, some estimates for the number of American workers displaced by immigration each year are as high as two million.

Adding millions of newcomers to the work force creates unfair competition and reduces wages and the availability of jobs for all workers. It is essential that immigration policy consider the impacts that mass immigration has on native-born and legal American workers.

And no, I'm not saying lessening immigration is the number one thing to do for U.S. workers (or for European workers). There are more important things to do, but it is part of the pathway to empowering labor relative to management. Increased unionization is a more important pathway, but note the Obama administration in the U.S. has done less than nothing for workers in that respect. Bringing back tariffs to balance the competition with extremely low-wage exporting nations is another and very important way forward. Tightening immigration is simply one important part of a common sense taking care of the working class and working poor in the United States (and is what all industrialized nations used to do, in the 1940s thru 60s, when labor was much stronger politically). But, as usual and of course, neither big party in the U.S. cares about them.

P.S. -- I decided to diary about this after noticing that that otherwise very righteous organization, Adalah-NY, a pro-Palestinian human rights and activist group, also advocates for the same thing as the New York Times, blanket amnesty and increased immigration. I don't know why Adalah has decided to advocate mainly for Palestinians but also for cheap wages for big and small corporations, but it seems sure to alienate the U.S. working class and working poor from the group's central cause.

Also posted, in slightly altered form, at Pffugee Camp.

P.S 2: I'm apparently not allowed to post here anymore or temporarily, but I can update the diary content. I'll add the following, though I don't think I'll be successful in keeping low wages advocates on-topic rather than employing argument by distant association. Since that's all they have. In any case, here's labor economist Vernon Briggs:

"Immigration policy inevitably reflects a kind of national selfishness of which the major beneficiaries are the least fortunate among us." (Reder, 1963: 227)

Although seldom acknowledged when immigration policy is under consideration, there are significant social-justice issues at stake for the most needy in the resident population and labor force. Much of the rationale for the admission of immigrants in free societies ignores the impacts of their actions upon the labor market. Family reunification considerations, refugee admissions, political asylum approvals, responses to the ever-present pleas of some business organizations for unskilled workers, and the presence of illegal immigrants usually mean that a disproportionate number of the immigrant inflow are low skilled, poorly educated, and often have problems with the prevailing national language. As a consequence, it is the segment of the citizen labor force that is itself low skilled and poorly educated (that is, workers in the "secondary labor market," to use the jargon of labor economics) and those workers who have been marginalized by various social barriers (e.g., some specific segments of the population who have confronted discrimination, as well as inexperienced youths in general) that typically sustain the greatest adverse impacts of large immigrant inflows.

Too often immigration debates focus on the beneficiaries of immigration policies (that is, the immigrants themselves, employers, and sometimes consumers) while failing to acknowledge that there are always losers too, which is especially important since the losers are disproportionately those already on the bottom rungs of society's economic ladder as well as the taxpayers in general who often are required to support or to supplement the financial needs of unskilled immigrants and refugees. One of the strongest reasons for the existence of immigration policies that limit the number of immigrants is that they protect those citizen workers who are most vulnerable to the increased job and wage competition of immigrant entry. . . .

from

Immigration Policy in Free Societies: Are There Principles Involved or Is It All Politics?

By Vernon M. Briggs Jr.

November 2009

http://www.cis.org/immigration-principles