No to new immigrant labor, yes to U.S. workers

Each year the United States welcomes 1 million new permanent residents and issues an additional million temporary-worker visas, on top of an illegal immigrant population that numbered 11 million before the current border surge. Adding even more immigrants to address a “labor shortage” would discourage employer outreach to American workers and invite broader social disruptions. It is far from the necessity portrayed by immigration advocates.

When the demand for labor starts to exceed supply, employers have the incentive to raise wages, improve working conditions, and recruit from marginalized groups. In fact, a tight labor market is the rare uplift program that does not require any new taxes or regulations. Its benefits were on display during the boom years prior to the pandemic. As businesses scrambled to find workers, low-skill wages rose, people with disabilities entered the labor force in record numbers, and large companies even began recruiting ex-cons.

Now imagine that instead of needing to pursue marginalized Americans, employers instead had access to a free flow of labor from abroad. Why bother raising wages? Why bother hiring people with disabilities or criminal records? Increasing immigration would have short-circuited employer outreach to the Americans who most needed the work.

Unfortunately, when employers do have access to a large pool of foreign labor — e.g., illegal immigrants and “guest workers” in the agricultural sector — they are more than happy to cast aside native workers. An analysis of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission cases shows that immigrants are consistently favored over natives in low-skill employment, and the discrimination is not subtle. “All you Americans are fired” is an actual quote from a manager at Southern Valley Fruit and Vegetable in Georgia. The case led an attorney with Georgia Legal Services to note that “discrimination against American workers in the H-2A guest worker program is endemic.”

Because low-skill immigrants tend to be Hispanic, while low-skill natives are often black, the anti-native discrimination has a racial component. For example, according to an EEOC case against Paramount Staffing, potential workers at a Memphis warehouse would line up outside each day, but Paramount would select Hispanics over blacks, even when black workers were ahead of them in line. Sometimes managers would announce in English that there were no more positions. The potential black workers would then leave, and the Hispanics would come in to work.

The EEOC cases complement an abundance of quantitative studies finding that the economic effect of immigration is not altogether positive, but mixed, with the costs tending to fall on the least-skilled workers. Immigration “has contributed to increasing the wage gap between highand low-educated native workers over the past decades,” states a 2019 review article.

According to recent data, 27 million natives with less than a bachelor’s degree are without jobs during the current “labor shortage.” Of course, not all of them are readily employable. Low-skill natives do suffer disproportionately from personal problems such as drug abuse and welfare dependency, but this is not a reason to discard them in favor of foreigners. Removing the crutch of immigration would focus employers and policymakers on helping downtrodden Americans become productive citizens again.

Finally, we should not allow employment issues to obscure an important truth about immigration policy — namely, that immigrants are more than just widgets to be inserted into the production process. Large movements of peoples across borders have cultural and political effects that transcend labor markets.

Immigration affects everything from education to the environment to national security. Furthermore, at a time when the United States seems to have lost its cultural confidence, assuming that new immigrants will be smoothly absorbed into the melting pot seems optimistic, at best. We should be cautious about prescribing a solution as transformative as mass immigration to any particular economic problem, especially when the alternative in this case — getting Americans back to work — is so much more desirable.

Jason Richwine