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April 10, 2004
Illegal
Immigration: Outsourcing Jobs on Reverse?
By Domenico Maceri/HispanicVista.com
Reacting to one of my articles on
immigration, the reader stated that
companies hire "illegals"
because they are not "willing to pay
fair wages." As a result, the reader
went on, the American worker "gets
the shaft from the depressed wages."
My older brother, a
legal immigrant, a laborer, and a union
member, would totally agree. He sees
first hand in New Jersey how companies,
both big and particularly small ones,
refuse to hire union workers. They cost
much more.
By hiring
undocumented workers companies save money
and can "compete."
For my brother, who
is close to retirement after more than
thirty years as a laborer, having to
compete with illegal employees means a
struggle on a yearly basis to find enough
work. It’s not just the earnings,
which are a concern. It’s also a
question of maintaining his health
benefits, which require that he work a
certain number of days per year.
Losing health
insurance at his age is a serious
concern. No one, particularly a laborer,
can afford to pay medical bills without
health insurance.
There is no doubt
that undocumented workers affect the
livelihood of people like my brother.
Although they do work US citizens would
not take because it pays minimum wages or
slightly better and provides no health
insurance, in the case of construction,
union members would take the jobs, as
long as they are paid their standard
wages.
A basic law of
supply and demand says that if there were
fewer workers, wages would rise or at the
very least there’d be more available
work for people like my brother.
Yet, while wages for
people at the very bottom of the economic
scale are certainly pushed down by the
presence of undocumented workers,
benefits for society at large also
emerge.
It’s difficult
to explain to my brother that American
consumers, like him, benefit from the
toil of undocumented workers. Prices of
food are kept down because of the
undocumented workers.
My brother finds it
difficult to swallow the explanation that
food costs him less. He’d gladly pay
a little more for food if he had enough
work.
My brother is not
bitter about undocumented workers. If he
is, he hasn’t told me, probably
because I have often written about their
plight. It’s something my brother
understands. He knows what poverty
is, having experienced it first hand.
What he does not
understand is the fact that as he is
contemplating retirement he may not have
health care. He may not have a decent
pension.
It wasn’t
always like this. Things have
deteriorated considerably in the last
several years. The downturn in the
economy has reduced the amount of
available work. Companies became more
addicted to cheaper and cheaper labor.
Some of them have moved factories
overseas.
Companies that
cannot move overseas have benefited from
the availability of illegal immigration.
In essence, people from overseas come to
them asking for work. And they oblige.
Construction, like agriculture, and the
service industry in general, has become a
magnet for undocumented workers.
President Bush’s
proposal to allow workers from other
countries to enter the US if jobs are
awaiting them will further erode the
number of jobs available to American
workers. And their presence will depress
wages for all workers.
Globalization is
supposed to spark economic growth and
provide more jobs for everyone. That has
not been the case. My brother will muddle
through and retire in a few years. But
there are a lot of people in my brother’s
situation who are much younger and who
will be severely affected by government
policies which help companies become more
productive yet further reduce the
American middle class.
My brother does not
blame undocumented workers. It's our
government that's responsible,
particularly the Bush administration,
which seems clueless about the needs of
American workers like my brother. So when
members of the current Administration say
that the outsourcing of US jobs will be
beneficial, people like my brother wonder
which country Bush is the president of.
Will a Democratic
president improve the situation? My
brother and the millions in his situation
would say it’s difficult to imagine
how it could get worse.
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Domenico Maceri (dmaceri@hotmail.com),
PhD, UC Santa Barbara, a contributing
columnist to HispanicVista.com (www.hispanicvista.com),
teaches foreign languages at Allan
Hancock College in Santa Maria, CA.
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