No Need for Immigrants Here

"There are two questions to consider when deciding whether to stop welcoming illegal aliens. First, do we even need the flow of labor that illegal immigration represents? And second, whatever immigration policy we do adopt, can it be enforced if we make it easy to live here illegally, as we do now?

The answer to both questions is No.

There is no economic need for foreign labor, legal or illegal. There are an estimated 12 million illegal aliens in the United States, with perhaps 7 million of them in the labor market — either working or actively looking for work. But contrary to myths about "jobs Americans won't do," there is no major job category that is dominated by these illegal workers. The Census Bureau groups all jobs in the country into 473 categories, and in 2003-2004, only three small categories had even the tiniest majority of immigrant workers, legal and illegal. The large majority of America's taxi drivers, housekeepers, janitors, dishwashers, landscapers and construction laborers are native-born Americans.

More generally, the supporters of illegal immigration claim that low-skilled labor is a precious resource, like oil, and because we're running out of it at home, we have to import it from abroad. This, too, is false. On the contrary, immigration (legal and illegal) is actually crowding low-skilled Americans out of the labor market altogether. During the first half of this decade, the highest five-year period of immigration in our history, the percentage of working-age, native-born Americans without a high school degree who were in the labor force fell from 59 percent to 56 percent, and for those with only a high school degree, participation in the labor force fell from 78 percent to 75 percent. And American teenagers (aged 15 to 17) took an even bigger hit, seeing their labor force participation fall from 30 percent in 2000 to 24 percent in 2005."

Have you been listening to the Jurassic Press weeping about all of those farms where, sob, fruits and vegetables have been dying on the vine because of the dearth of illegals to harvest them?

Well, thats actually good news, now isn't it? Farm owners who break the law SHOULD be punished, and if there's suddenly, which I doubt by the way, a scarcity of beaners to boss around then perhaps its time to go back to the tried and true laborers who've been doing the work for decade upon decade, and have been dropped to second-class citizen status for being, well, REAL citizens.

BAN THE BEANER. RE-HIRE THE AMERICAN WORKER.