Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [25]
At some higher wage, there would be more Americans harvesting tomatoes, hanging drywall, and applying for chambermaid positions at Hilton. Prices matter. And the willingness of Americans to do a job depends on how much the position pays. But at the same time, businesses can’t raise salaries without regard for what consumers are willing to pay for goods and services, which is why we can’t raise the minimum wage to twenty-five dollars an hour and— poof! — eliminate poverty. Agribusiness would certainly attract more Americans if field hands made fifty thousand dollars a year, but not without also affecting the price of food. Not only would we have to pay more for groceries, but higher food prices would rebound to the restaurant industry, for example, since fewer people would eat out.
Restrictionists also assume that all of these jobs would exist in the absence of the immigrants who now fill them, but that’s not how labor markets work. Seal the border, and you don’t get the same number of jobs at higher salaries. What you get instead are fewer jobs overall. One of the bigger disruptions would be in light manufacturing, where businesses would likely opt to close or move overseas if the immigrant labor supply were cut off. The only reason our textile industry still exists is because textile mills in places like North Carolina and Georgia have had access to immigrant labor. The same holds true for meatpacking plants in the Midwest. And there are other examples. “The restaurant industry is the country’s largest private sector employer with 12.5 million people,” says John Gay of the National Restaurant Association. “We project we’re going to add 15 percent to that number of job slots in the next ten years. But the 16-24 age group that makes up half of our industry’s workforce isn’t growing at all over ten years. If we don’t find a way for our industry to get more workers—and we’re not the only ones in this boat—we’re going to be in a world of hurt.”
Pia Orrenius, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas who has analyzed the effects of Latin American immigration, agrees. “Basically, a lot of these jobs would not exist at higher wages, and that would affect our economic well-being,” says Orrenius. “You wouldn’t have people manicuring nails if it costs $200 to have it done. And if you want the college-educated sitting down and doing nails, that’s what it would take to make it worth their time.” Of course we don’t want that, says Orrenius. “Because if you have high-skilled natives doing low-productivity jobs, it’s a fundamental misallocation of labor and a big inefficiency. And it makes people—natives— worse off.”
Yes, there are Americans with low skills to fill these jobs. The problem is that the number of such Americans is steadily shrinking, which is a good thing. Orrenius’s point is that we don’t want people doing jobs that they’re overqualified for. That leads to inefficiencies in the labor market. The fear is that if low-skill foreigners aren’t available to fill certain jobs and perform certain services, those jobs and services will either go away or be filled by overqualified individuals who will demand high salaries to fill them. (In much of Europe, for example, dry-cleaning is a luxury, and inflexible labor markets are the reason.)
The labor shortage in agriculture is such that some 20 percent of crops were left at the farm gate in 2006. The problem was expected to worsen in 2007, since the number of government raids had increased and most farm workers are illegal aliens. Restrictionist lawmakers, talk radio, and the editors of National Review keep assuring us that wages for field hands eventually will rise to a level where overqualified natives will be induced to pick lettuce in Yuma and weed fields in the lower Rio Grande Valley. But that’s not what’s happening.
American growers who live in the real world and need to stay competitive have other options, one of which is to offshore, or move production outside of the United States. Tim Chelling