A year or two ago there were numerous news stories that quoted pro-illegal immigration advocates saying that illegal immigration has little or no effect on wages, and that they were doing work that Americans wouldn’t do.
Well, guess what? They were wrong on both counts:
As the topic of immigration and workplace raids begins to heat up again in a new administration, a new study finds that wages and employment grew for legal workers after a series of 2006 raids.
The report, by Jerry Kammer of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a think tank that advocates against amnesty for illegal immigrants but also against mass deportations of the same, looked at the aftermath of six immigration raids at Swift & Co. meat-packing plants in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas, Colorado and Utah. About 1,300 undocumented workers were arrested, and another 400 without authorization to work in the United States were detected around the same time through better company screening.
The popular notion that illegals were doing only the work that Americans wouldn’t do also took a hit in this study:
“There is good evidence that after the raids the number of native-born workers increased significantly,” Kammer writes, noting that all of the plants were back to full production within five months.
It’s quite amazing that pro-illegal immigration advocates would claim that wage suppression is not a byproduct of illegal immigration. It’s just common sense, as the report cited above shows. If illegal immigrants are not available to work for low wages, the employers must increase wages to entice legal residents to take the jobs. How hard is that to understand? It wasn’t that this was work that Americans wouldn’t do, it was work that Americans wouldn’t do for Third World wages.
