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Jewish World Review May 17, 2005 / 8 Iyar, 5765 Immigration's not-so-hidden costs hurt American workers By Clarence Page
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Despite the partisan bickering for which Washington is known these days, there were nothing but smiles and warm and cheery bipartisanship as Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John McCain announced the Senate version of a bill to overhaul the nation's battered immigration policy. Let's hope it works this time.
I've lost count of how many other comprehensive overhauls of immigration policy we have had since the 1965 reform of which Kennedy was a principal sponsor. He promised sensible limits to what seemed to be an out-of-control influx of newcomers. Two decades later, immigration had more than doubled and Congress passed another bill in 1986.
But enforcement of border security and sanctions against employers who knowingly hire illegals slacked off, often under pressure from employers and immigrant rights groups. Two decades after that, here we are again.
"We are a nation of immigrants," Kennedy said in announcing the new bill. "And we always will be, and our laws must be true to that proud heritage." I agree with that. But I also know that the nation can have too much of a good thing, especially those who have entered the workforce illegally.
Controlled and orderly immigration is enriching for our country. But massive large-scale immigration puts a squeeze on low-wage workers who already are here and facing a shrinking demand for their low-skilled labors.
Hardly anyone argues with that, but the difference between what our lawmakers say and what they do about immigration limits has amounted to a lot of make-believe. Through lax enforcement of border security and employer sanctions, and other policies, we beckon, "Y'all come!"
Since 1965, the traditional trickle of new immigrants, which averaged a little more than 200,000 a year over the nation's history, surged upward to an estimated 2 million a year, about half of them illegal.
That puts pressure on wages, of course, at a time when low-skilled jobs have dried up. Increased immigration was one of five major factors that led to that job decline, as Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson recounts in his 1996 book "When Work Disappears."
The other four were the nation's shift from a manufacturing-based to a service-based economy, the increased outsourcing of low-skilled work to countries where labor is cheaper, advances in technology that have increased demand for high-skilled workers while reducing demand for low-skilled workers and the decline of unions that traditionally drive up wages and benefits.
Yet we continue to hear about how illegals only take the "jobs nobody wants." Ideally, there is almost no job that somebody would not want and make themselves available to do, if you offer them enough money to do it. Whenever I hear someone talk about the "jobs nobody wants" what I really hear is: "jobs that pay less than most Americans need to support their families."
The unexpected sweeping success of welfare reform at moving mothers off welfare and into work should have exploded that myth, yet it persists, fed by stereotypes that feed on themselves.
A closer look finds another reality: There are more people looking for work in de-industrialized urban communities than there are jobs available. One often-cited study of fast-food businesses in Harlem by anthropologist Katherine Newman at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government 10 years ago found 14 applicants for every job that was filled. A year later, her study found, only 25 percent of those who were turned down had found work.
Despite the stereotype of immigrants taking only hard-labor jobs that unemployed blacks and others don't want, the percent of immigrants in the laborer and fabricator category of the labor force, 20 percent, was slightly less than that of African-Americans, 22 percent, in the 1998 census survey.
Yet, the invisible struggles of real-life poor black folks can hardly compete with the distorted media images.
A century ago, black industrialists like Booker T. Washington, black civil rights leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois and later black labor leaders like A. Philip Randolph were united in their call for sharp reductions in new immigration, then mostly from Europe, as long as there was an abundant supply of available, able-bodied black workers already here.
That's changed since the 1960s. Today, largely in pursuit of political solidarity across ethnic lines, it is hard to find a major black politician or civil rights leader who will call for reducing illegal immigrants, let alone scaling back legal immigration. In the absence of reasonable voices, it is left too often to demagogues to give voice to the immigration concerns of ordinary Americans, sometimes with a frightening tinge of racism and nativism that further chills any chance for reasonable discussion.
We deserve better than that as a nation. But, if the civil rights community and the Congressional Black Caucus, just for starters, do not give voice to the concerns of American workers who are left behind in yet another immigration wave, who will?
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Comment on Clarence Page's column by clicking here. © 2005, TMS |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
