The Labor Glut Is Coming to Town
Diversifying ourselves to death.
No matter how articulate you are, sooner or later you meet someone more articulate still who can make your point better than you can. Some people are threatened and react accordingly. Others, like me, are delighted to have a sharper arrow in our rhetorical quiver. This was the delightful experience I had this morning when I read a commentary on CNSNews by Christopher G. Adamo. He makes my various points about illegal immigration more eloquently than I've done so far in the following excerpt:
Primarily, they (open border supporters--ER) operate under the noble sounding premise that "illegal immigrants are only doing jobs that Americans will not do." More accurately, they do jobs Americans refuse to do for Mexican wages.
In any case, how many jobs of this nature could there possibly be? Do they suggest that the twelve to fifteen million illegals already in this country are insufficient to perform such work? The stark truth is that illegals only linger briefly in such jobs, thereafter occupying higher rungs of the economic ladder, where they further displace American workers.
Which succinctly state the two main points I've been trying to make for years. One, Americans are perfectly willing to do any job if they can live decently on what it pays. I've had some pretty miserable jobs in the past, but they paid well by way of compensation for that misery. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case. Two, whatever else you can say about illegal immigrants, they are still fellow human beings and as such the one thing they want more than any other is for their kids to have it better than they did.
I'll elaborate some on those points. In the first case it is undeniable that over-immigration displaces American workers at the bottom of the socio-economic rung of society. It's basic the basic supply and demand principle. Even at a depressed US wage newcomers are usually better off than they were in their native countries. However, very few native Americans will accept the decline in their living standard required by those very depressed wages. So, in that sense, the detractors are right. Americans won't do those jobs anymore for a good reason. It would be stupid to do so.
Ah, but there's the rub. Many people seem to forget,those displaced don't just conveniently disappear into the ether. They have to go somewhere. If you're on the bottom rung of legitimate society, you only have three places you can go. The first two are a life of crime or the public dole, both of which hurt society as a whole. The only other alternative is to improve and reinvent yourself and move up the social ladder. Many displaced persons do this, which increases competition for jobs at those levels and consequently puts downward pressure on wages.
In my own experience, I was stunned when I graduated college and found that all the Bachelor's level jobs in my new field paid less than my old blue-collar job, a lot less. My whining about the situation prompted one of my college professors to inform me that the supply of college graduates was exceeding the demand in most fields and that, consequently, the Bachelor's degree was the new high school diploma, and that I needed to get a Master's to even have a hope of a high-paying job.
As for the second point, I have noticed that many native American citizens just assumed that the son of the guy that mows his lawn will mow the lawn of his sons and daughters. Uh-uh. Ain't no way. Nix-na, nein, no way, uh-uh. That guy working three jobs isn't doing it so his kids can work three jobs. He's doing it so that his kids can compete with your kids for middle-class jobs, and so that his grandkids can compete with your grandkids for admission to med and law schools.
No one can blame immigrants, legal or otherwise, for wanting to come here. But it is unfair to those of us already here, and our descendents. Any immigration past the point required to relieve labor shortages is ultimately harmful to the country. Just like Castro took advantage of the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 to flush out his prisons and mental hospitals, Mexico and other countries are using our dysfunctional borders to flush out their chronically unemployed who, if they stayed in their own country's, could very well become a threat to the entrenched leadership. In essence, despite what apologists say, these countries are exporting their problems to us.
These countries will keep exporting their problems to use because from their perspective it would be foolish to do so. Not only do they get the unemployed out of their hair, those same people send billions of dollars back to relatives in their home countries. As an example, Mexico is reported to get one-fifth of its GNP (gross national product) from remittances sent by immigrants here in the United States. This is done at the expense of our own GPD.
No matter what the naysayers say, Americans are not against immigration as such. What they are against is an unrelenting invasion.
