Illegal immigration hurts America’s poor
Dallas Morning News

Froma Harrop: Illegal immigration hurts America’s poor

They compete more for jobs and get paid less for them

January 6, 2007

There’s a popular game in America that goes, I’ll cut your wages, but you don’t cut mine. And the outsourcing of your factory job to China is a good thing because it makes my paycheck go further at Wal-Mart. We hear this theme a lot in the debate over illegal immigration.

Consider the recent raids on Swift meat-processing plants. Federal agents arrested 1,187 illegal immigrants at facilities in six states. Mere hours later, economists warned that depriving the industry of illegal labor could raise hamburger prices.

Illegal immigration is usually presented as a win-win situation: Undocumented foreigners earn far more than they could back home. Consumers get a bargain.

Nowhere to be seen are America’s working poor, who get stomped on 13 different ways. They have to compete with illegal immigrants for jobs and housing. Low-skilled natives and legal immigrants also end up subsidizing the undocumented because they tend to live in the same communities, which must provide hospitals, police, schools and garbage pickup.

Who doesn’t suffer from illegal immigration? For starters, the people who write about it. I speak of the journalism profession, which has the habit of covering the issue with sympathetic stories about illegal immigrants who work hard and go to church.

But were a busload of illegals from Australia to turn up and offer reportage at 10 percent below the going rate, the writers would call the authorities so fast your head would spin. And the publisher’s argument that thanks to the cheap Australians, he’s able to trim a few cents off the newsstand price would make no impression.

As it turns out, the meat-processing companies that employ so many illegal immigrants have been enjoying a nearly 50 percent discount on what was the going rate. In 1980, the average meat-processing job paid $19 an hour. The companies then moved their plants to rural areas, far from the Midwest cities and their unions. The average wage now? About $9 an hour.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce likes to wail about the “labor shortage.” It says there aren’t enough chambermaids, dishwashers, etc. to work for its members at lousy wages. Odd, but when there’s a shortage of labor – or anything else – doesn’t the price of it go up? The price of unskilled labor in the United States hasn’t gone up. It’s gone down. Because of immigration, American-born high school dropouts experienced a 5 percent loss in wages during the ’80s and ’90s, according to a study by Harvard economist George Borjas

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