Illegals do jobs Americans don't want to do. So it is written...

The BBQ Pit
41

OH MY GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE!!! Actually, I’m making a case for the minimum wage to rise to the level of last year’s bottom per-capita income, which isn’t exactly revolutionary, Bubba.

So, yes, saorise, I understand that both some liberals and some conservatives use this argument to further their agendas. Nevertheless, I think that artificially suppressing certain wages in the agricultural sector (nobody’s suggesting that per-mile trucking fees go down!) could be beneficial, just as the Fed sometimes thinks lower profits for real property sellers might be good for the country as a whole. By all means, make the argument that sellers should always triumph over buyers, if you want, but since all of us are frequently both, you may have a tough sell on your hands.

42

So there should be a separate minimum wage for Mexicans?

43

Yeah, it’s pretty damned expensive to live here, but the MW is about $7/hour, so you could do a lot worse. And remember, that’s to start. The guys who stick around and do a good job make quite a bit more. Thing is, most of them rotate out after a few years-- some go back to Mexico, some get other jobs. Whatever. But Americans? The few that he’s hired last a week or maybe a month and then they’re gone.

I’m just curious if there are statistics about how many illegal immigrants work for less than MW and in conditions that are blantant violations of worker safety laws. I’m sure thare are many that do, but how many? 50%? 25? 10% If we had that info we could make a more informed judgement about whether they’re doing jobs that Americans are just too lazy or unmotivated to do, or whether they’re doing jobs that no one should have to do (for that pay and those working conditions) in this country.

44

Why? I’d much rather an undocumented worker than a felon as my employee, if I put the law aside.

45

Do you have a cite that shows that “*most *illegal aliens work in the “underground” (i.e. cash-only) economy”? I’ll concede that as a %, more “illegals” do so than “legals”, but I doubt if it’s “most”, and I’d like a cite for that.

46

That, in and of itself, is not a compelling argument. To use another example, requiring the meat industry to displose of pollution properly rather than just dumping it any old place also increases prices, and yet the latter is not seriously considered as an option for obvious reasons (as a practical matter, people don’t want to be exposed to industrial pollution; as a philosophical matter, the meat industry has no right to injure nonconsenting third parties in order to save money).

47

You are incorrect. Do you have anything that shows that no illegals file tax returns? Since my Bro worked for the IRS, and now does Income taxes for a living, he has assumed me that most “illegals” can and do file taxes.Some even get back more that they pay in by means of the EITC.

If you are “illegal” you can file your taxes in one of two ways- by a bogus SSN, or completely legally by means of an ITIN. The IRS can NOT divulge any information of potential “illegal” status to the INS or any other agency- to do so would net the Auditor the loss of his job and perhaps jail time, it’s a violation of the Privacy act.

Indeed the IRS changed the way one claims examptions (you need a SSN now) due to the fact there was a HUGE problem with Illegals claiming their dependents in Mexico for the purposes of EITC. You can still claim your kids in Mexico (with an ITIN) , but it’s hard to get EITC for them as they need a valid SSN to do so.

Still today my Bro has a number of clients who are Illegal and who have their entire family living here, and thus they not only get a full refund of witholding, they also get EITC, thus they pay a net negative taxes.

True, down the line there will be problems if they remain illegal and they want to claim Social Security. But if they become naturalized, they have no problem.

Common misconceptions about Illegal Alien workers in the USA:

  1. They don’t pay taxes- most pay FICA and Federal Witholding. Some few are too scared to file a tax return so they lose their Witholding, but those are more that offset by those that do file and may even get EITC. But they all pay gas and sales taxes.

  2. They are paid “under the table”: Sure, more that most native born Americans are, but not exclusively, and a good number of native born Americans work in the undergound cash economy too. But many Illegals work for large companies that are way too smart to pay anyone “under the table”. Note the Swift case.

  3. They get paid less then Minimum wage: rarely. If you, as an employer are raided by the INS, you can claim “plausible denaibility” if everyone is paid the same and you have copies of the fake ID’s the illegals gave you. If the INS sees that you pay the Illegals half of what you pay Americans, you no longer have plausible deniability, and you’re fucked. Note the Swift case.

  4. Food or Hotels or whatever prices would go way up: not so much. There was a study done on this that showed produce prices might rise about 8%. We forget the large legal Bracero worker community of legal south of the border workers who would still exist. Sure, get rid of all workers but citizens, and prices might go up quite a bit.

True, Illegals" do tend to take the jobs that pay less and are hard. Jobs that Americans don’t want- as much. But so do the legal “braceros”.

48

Ok, but why would a business paying full benefits to all and above minimum wage deal with the hassle of hiring illegals if they had plenty of non-illegals to do the work? No risk of being fined or closed down, no translation difficulties, no risk of being in a bind should the illegals get taken away, etc.?

49

From what I’ve heard, many employers think illegal immigrants (or immigrants in general) just have a better work ethic than Americans when it comes to hard, manual labor. Plus, most of the time they don’t know who is a legal and who is an illegal immigrant. My buddy tells me most of the illegal guys he hires are farming people, and they’re used to getting up early and doing a hard days work. It’s no big deal to them. They’re happy to bust their butts for $12 -$15/hour since it’s 4 or 5 times as much as they can make in Mexico. And they’re willing to do what it takes to live cheaply-- lots of people to a house, and cheap food. If they don’t have their families with them, it’s a good deal for them relative to what they’d get back home.

50

Yeah, something tells me when it came down to it, those Americans who say they would do the fruit picking and all that would quit within a week when they saw was a pain in the ass it is.

51

According to the L.A. Federation of Labor one large group of hotel workers is making a whopping $6.75 an hour (salaries are due to go up at the end of the year).

I guess the people who fill those jobs are just more industrious than the average American worker. Or more desperate. And desperation is a good thing. It promotes productivity. :rolleyes:

Then again, it’s probably a subjective judgment that 14K per year is a substandard wage for the L.A. area. Stuff a few of those earners into an apartment, add up the dough and laissez les bon temps rouler.

52

Dammit, on preview I see in-depth explanations of my main point, but here it is anyway in case it helps:

I’m not minded to call anyone in particular out, but you guys can’t say no illegal immigrants pay any taxes or insurance because you don’t know. I’m not going to put my foot in my mouth and claim ‘most’, knowing how small a percentage of the country’s population I personally deal with, but there are tons of illegals here who do. They do it with a fake SSN, and it’s more likely a precaution against being discovered (not every salary is on a cash-only basis) than a patriotic love for the country that hates them, but it happens. A chunk of their salaries go to social security/medicare with every paycheck, and they never see that money again. No I am not illegal myself or anything close to it (I always have been American and am neither assured exclusion from the laboring workforce nor in a position to hire anybody), and yes, I’ve known people like this (the whole undocumented angle surely makes it hard to produce a cite). It’s better to have information to consider than to dismiss it.
And before anyone asks, I’m not on either ‘side’. I don’t support lawbreaking, but I sure as hell support a change in immigration policy, making it more possible for people to actually become legal - it’s not often taken into consideration how impossible it is for how many (again, personal anecdotes of success are not really indicative of anything). Honestly, I don’t fault them taking a chance on making a better life for themselves, all done at great risk - even the working itself, with the off chance on any job that one’s employer can simply turn you in instead of paying you after they’ve gotten the work out of you. They’re people, not all unambitious, untrustworthy, greedy shifty-eyed stereotypes, and I believe a lot of what’s going on (including whatever real impact on the wage market there is) is wrong and the system is not working properly. And for those about to go ‘well, that’s what you get for breaking the law, no matter what the application,’ fine. But none of you better be one of those outraged legions in the statutory rape thread trying to ream Aangelica for saying the same thing (“Oh, but that’s different, that kid’s an American! he deserves to be thought of as a human being!” :smack: ).

And saoirse, employers, if they’re smart, do care about whether the illegals they hire are felons or drug users. That’s an issue of safety and productivity.

53

When you said “substandard” I assumed you meant below MW. If all you mean is that they’ll do jobs for MW, so what? Why is it so bad for some Americans to work for MW? I did, when I was in High School and over the summers. There is nothing “substandard” about MW-- it is the standard. If you think the MW is too low, then raise it-- but that’s different issue. Do you think the workers are going to change when that new law takes efffect? Are the illegal aliens doing those job going to be priced out of the market and go running back to Mexico by a bunch of American citizens fighting for those jobs cleaning Hotel rooms? I doubt it. (BTW, I think that article is old because the MW in LA is already higher than 6.75, which is the state MW, set to go up in Jan '07).

54

It is pathetic to cite the wage one made “in high school and over the summers” as OK for jobs in which typical workers are much older, often are the major or only breadwinner in their household and which apply to semipermanent situations in which there are considerable physical stressors accompanied by a lack of health insurance.

Here’s another cite regarding hotel worker wages:

“Some tipped workers in big hotels, like banquet servers, doormen, waiters and bartenders, can make comfortable incomes, but the average hotel housekeeper in the United States makes $7.85 an hour, not enough for a full-time worker to rise above the understated official poverty level for a family of four, now set at $18,850 a year.”

If the pay does rise to respectable levels, I would expect to see more competition for jobs now largely held by recent immigrants. Then again, I don’t have the mindset that typical American workers see themselves as above physical labor.

55

Who says they have to the be only breadwinner in a household? Aren’t there any “Americans” who are single, just getting started in life? Aren’t there any “Americans” who are secondary wage earners in their families? Why are they too good for a MW job? If you grew up in this country, and took advantage of a tiny fraction of the educational opportunities you were offered, you shouldn’t be looking at a job cleaning Hotel rooms to support your fucking family. You should be doing something that requires just a little more skill than that, don’t you think?

56

Yes, there are. When I took my first real full-time job I hauled in a rockin’ $550/month and lived under crappy circumstances until I could move up to something better. Of course, I wasn’t working in a field where wages are kept low and benefits minimal thanks to a steady influx of illegal labor. And I was young and fortunate enough to not have any serious health problems.

Why yes, there are always high-paying secure jobs for those with enough enterprise and gumption to find them. Anyone who settles for less is shiftless and/or stupid, right?

Why is it you assume that no hotel workers are the primary wage earners for their family? Is this a conclusion for which you have supporting information, or just wishful thinking?
Where did you develop this contempt for people holding “menial” jobs?

57

Jackmannii: I’m not going to respond to your distortion of my post. I’ll just note that this all started with this exchange we had:

If you meant to say “Americans who are the sole bread winners for their families”, which is what you’re talking about now, we’d be having a different discussion. Those Americans in past years who were breadwinners for their families were more likely than not the bottom tier of society (Blacks or other minorities) who literally did not have access to a decent education and even if they did were kept out of many good jobs by discriminatory laws and/or social conventions that “kept them in their place.”

Picking fruit, cleaning hotel rooms, and bussing tables have always been crappy jobs that paid shit (“substandard”) wages. There was never a time when the people doing those jobs had good pay, healthcare coverage, access to childcare (unless it was a relative) or other niceties like that.

58

Why, no. No, there should not (I assume you’re not talking about wages in Mexico). What a strange idea.

And there’s a good reason the minimum wage should be increased regularly: it benefits the least-advantaged, which is humane and has a certain Rawlsian appeal. I phrased my opinion clumsily, and I apologize for that: I do not advocate poor wages and working conditions and exemption from regulation as a means of suppressing prices. What I object to is the oversimplification that higher wages in general are always a good thing, as if they have no economic effect other than making everybody richer. If your larger paycheck buys a smaller sack of groceries, you’re not coming out ahead. That’s all.

59

For those who welcome the idea that unskilled labor should have “crappy jobs that pa(y) shit wages” (so that they can eat more cheaply in restaurants and stay overnight in hotels for less), here’s an interesting column from Froma Harrop:

*The U.S. Chamber of Commerce likes to wail about the “labor shortage.” It says there aren’t enough chambermaids, dishwashers, etc. to work for its members at lousy wages. Odd, but when there’s a shortage of labor — or anything else — doesn’t the price of it go up?

The price of unskilled labor in the United States hasn’t gone up. It has gone down. Because of immigration, American-born high-school dropouts experienced a 5-percent loss in wages during the '80s and '90s, according to a study by Harvard economist George Borjas.

For some reason, the job of keeping prices low has fallen entirely on the shoulders of the most vulnerable Americans. If we banged down CEO compensation and sliced lawyers’ pay by a third, the same thing would happen. Everyone’s prices would drop. The corporation could sell its products for less, and the cost of legal services would fall.

No vocation keeps a tighter lid on immigration than the medical profession. “If we let in 100,000 immigrant doctors,” Richard Freeman, another Harvard economist, recently told a group of journalists, “everyone in this room would benefit.” Except the American doctors.

Suggest a U.S. labor policy that depresses professional pay as a means of keeping prices in check, and you get laughed out of the room. But say that sitting on the wages of unskilled factory workers stems inflationary pressure — a frequent argument — and the Ph.D.s quietly nod in agreement.*

The likely response to this is something like “well, just stay in school…go to college and there’ll be lots of good opportunities for you.” And for those not fortunate enough to have the educational opportunities - well, it’s good policy to force down wages by allowing employers to get away with hiring illegal immigrants - right?

Except, apparently if it were to affect professionals. I’d love to see the N.Y Times editorialists and columnists who blat about this subject, compete with commentators from abroad for half the pay.

60

To those who belive that illegal aliens do not work “off the books”: there are many variations on this theme. Tytpically, landscape companies will pay a guy for 10 hours of work-and pay the remaining 30 hours in cash. Or, the employee will be an independent subcontarctor (responsible for paying his own taxes). either way, the net effect of this is to drive american workers out of these jobs-a legitimate landscaping company cannot compete with a firm hiring illegals.
And none of this addresses the subsrantial amount of crimes committed by illegal aliens-like the people driving unregistered, uninsured cars, who cause accidents, or the fact that illegal aliens are kept in jails at public expense.
illegal alien labor looks cheap on the surface-but when these other costs are factored in, it is quite expensive.