Undocumented labor: solutions, not scapegoating

 

Trump has promised to deport >10 million undocumented people living in the US. He justifies this by saying they are dangerous criminals. In fact, immigrants commit crimes at a *lower* rate than US citizens. He has announced his intention to deploy US troops in US streets to capture and detain people who are claimed to be undocumented. 

Trump also justifies the massive deportation on the grounds that the undocumented are taking lots of jobs from citizens. The facts and evidence don’t support that assertion:

“A recent synthesis of dozens of studies found that immigration had only a very slight negative impact on the wages of less-educated native-born workers. A comprehensive overview by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found modest negative effects only for some earlier immigrants and for teenagers. A paper published this spring, whose authors included Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, Davis, found that immigration had a positive impact on U.S. workers.

 

“Why could that be? Immigrants don’t just add labor to an economy; they also add demand for goods and services, which creates jobs for other people. Also, those coming illegally tend to have low levels of education. The jobs they do, like working in meatpacking plants, allow more native-born workers to move into positions as supervisors, salespeople and accountants.

 

“It really matters how you ask the questions,” said Janice Fine, director of the Workplace Justice Lab at Rutgers University, who has long studied immigrants and the workforce. “Neoclassical economists were modeling the relationship, but they weren’t going to particular labor markets in real time and looking at what had happened.”

Indeed, labor unions are working to improve the status of undocumented workers:

“Second, labor unions had figured out that it was possible to organize with immigrants. Those increasingly diversified organizations — including the Service Employees International Union, which represents immigrant-heavy sectors like janitorial work and health care — began to fight for protections for workers lacking permanent legal status, rather than to exclude them from the country.

 

“In recent years, labor unions and politicians they support have argued for a path to legal status for those who have lived in the United States for years without authorization. They also generally support changes to guest worker programs, used in seasonal industries like agriculture, fishing, hospitality and landscaping, that would raise pay and allow workers to move around to different jobs. Such provisions could make employers less likely to use those programs to undercut wages for Americans.”

Trump’s deportations will be expensive and inhumane. They will drive inflation—the very issue that helped get him elected—by reducing goods and services previously provided by undocumented labor, and by making employers pay more for replacement labor. What we need is more rational ways to welcome immigrants, not the militarization of immigration enforcement.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/11/22/nation/trump-immigration-economy/