February 23, 2006
Looking (in vain) for "Jobs Americans Won’t Do"
When unveiling his
guest worker proposal, President Bush
urged Americans to "legalize the process of
people doing
jobs Americans won't do." Illegal immigrants, in
this view, are essential to the country’s economic
growth.
As I have
shown before, nothing could be further from the
truth.
There are at least 7 million
illegal aliens working in the U.S.—about 4.5% of the
civilian labor force. Certain occupations have
abnormally high
concentrations of illegals: [Unauthorized
Migrants: Numbers and Characteristics, Pew
Hispanic Center, By Jeffrey S. Passel, June 14, 2005]
Yet illegals
make up only 13%
of hotel industry workers, 11% of restaurant and food
service workers, and 10% of construction workers.
Clearly millions of Americans are doing precisely the
same jobs, and countless others were working in
these fields before being displaced by foreign-born
workers.
Admittedly, these are blue collar
jobs requiring little in the way of education or special
skills. Yet literally millions of unlettered, unemployed
natives are available to fill those slots. In 2004:
(Table 1):
American workers in building
cleaning and maintenance have an 11% unemployment rate.
Similarly, 13% of native construction workers and 9% of
native workers in food preparation are unemployed. [Illegals
hurt Americans, By John Hostettler and Lamar
Smith, Washington Times, December 2, 2005]
Illegal aliens work for less, are
less likely to
have medical insurance, and are often paid "off
the books." They are a boon for all manner of
employers, ranging from the neighborhood tree service to
Wal-Mart.
I
examined the relationship between foreign worker
penetration (i.e., the percent of workers that are
foreign-born) and wages in particular industries. The
industry with the largest foreign-born share (38.3%) in
2004 was "Other services, private households"—a
category that includes cleaning girls,
nannies, gardeners, etc., while the smallest
penetration (2.8%) was in "Agricultural,
self-employed"—farmers
who own their land. These figures reflect legal and
illegal immigrant workers in each industry.
I was able to find average
wages for 17 of these industries at the BLS website.
(Table 2.) The following "scatter diagram" shows,
for those 17 industries, the percent change in foreign
penetration on the y (vertical) axis and the percent
change in real wages on the X (horizontal) axis:
As you can see, the trend line
has a downward slope, indicating that industries with
above average increases in foreign penetration had below
average increases in real wages.
In a word: the data confirm
the notion that increased foreign worker penetration
brings lower wage and income gains.
There is no dearth of
American workers—just wages and working conditions
that sink lower with each immigrant wave.
Edwin S. Rubenstein (email
him) is President of
ESR Research Economic Consultants in Indianapolis.
