The Myth of the Jobs Americans Won't Do

During the Immigration Wars of 2006 I was one of those on the "wrong side" I supported the McCain / Kennedy bill and President Bush's efforts. My reasoning was simple. If you make it economically unviable for companies to hire illegals then they won't. Without work illegals will return home. My idea for a plan was this:

1. Secure The Border


2. Workplace Enforcement


3. Deport The Criminals


4. Legalization


5. Assimilation (Including English as the official language)

I was pretty roundly attacked. Those on the open borders side claimed that there was worked that Americans just wouldn't do and those on the round 'em all up side believed that once here illegals would never leave. Over the past couple years I have posted a number of incidents that disprove the second claim (most recently Sept. of last year) but today I stumbled across an article that addresses the first:

Following a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid that nabbed 300 undocumented workers at a Columbia Farms processing plant in Columbia, S.C., a spooked House of Raeford quietly began replacing immigrants with native-born labor at all of its plants. Less than a year later, House of Raeford’s flagship production line in Raeford, N.C., had been transformed, going from more than 80 percent Latino to 70 percent African-American, according to a report by the Charlotte Observer.

...

Despite President Fox’s assertion, of the Pew Hispanic Center’s top six occupational sectors for undocumented immigrants (farming, maintenance, construction, food service, production and material moving), all six employed hundreds of thousands of blacks in 2008. That year, almost 15 percent of meat-processing workers were black, as were more than 18 percent of janitors. And although blacks on the whole aren’t involved in agriculture at anywhere near the rates of illegal immigrants—a quarter of whom work in farming—about 14 percent of fruit and vegetable sorters are African-American.

For their efforts, African Americans were paid a median household income of $32,000 in 2007. In the same year, the median household income for illegal immigrants was $37,000.

source

This article was obviously dealing mainly with African Americans, but it kind of puts the kibosh on the idea that Americans won't do the work. Not only will they do it they will do it for less.

So once again I return to the argument that illegal immigration is an economic issue and the best way to handle it is economically.