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Illegal workers contribute to the pressures on the
underclass. Allowing the union movement to atrophy (often by union bosses
who are overpaid and have forgotten why unions were created in the first place)
adds to the problem.
arthur From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Karen Watters Cole Sent: Tuesday, May 23, 2006 2:45 PM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [Futurework] It's About Identity 2: America's Great Wall Karen wrote:
From
what Ive read, the economic studies are
mixed whether illegals drive wages down for other
workers.
Arthur wrote:
If
the illegals didn't drive down wages or, at least, disallow wages to rise then
all of economic theory must be wrong. I can't see how illegals would have
no impact and I believe that their impact is to affect the lowest paid workers
in our society who can't get increased wages: Asking for more means the employer
would turn to the illegal instead. Some argue that much of those decreases are
the result of the loss of union jobs, not illegal workers per se and have to be factored into
overall changes in the jobs economy. Here are a few
items: From Center for American Progress:
Alan Krueger, the Bendheim Professor of Economics and
Public Policy at Princeton, argues that the best available economic evidence
suggests that increased immigration has little impact on wages for low-wage
domestic workers. He also argues that if we are serious about helping
low-income workers, we need to act now on measures that can have a much larger
impact, like increasing the minimum wage. Krueger's paper concludes by
discussing the importance of protecting the rights of immigrant workers--to
maximize their contribution to our economy and to prevent exploitation of both
these workers and domestic workers. Read complete
memo (PDF) Let's do immigration
right How to avoid the mistakes we made when we
argued about free trade. By Gene Sperling, for Fortune magazine, April
18, 2006: 7:22 AM EDT NEW
YORK - The boiling debate over the economics of immigration may give you an
eerie sense of déjà vu, and no wonder: Its superheated rhetoric recalls the
polarized and exaggerated arguments over open trade and globalization in the
1990s. Foes
of immigration try to brush off legitimate macroeconomic studies like the
1997 National Research Council
report that shows immigration adds $10
billion a year
to the economy, and the work of academics like Giovanni Peri and Gianmarco Ottaviano, who found that immigration
raised average wages by as much as 2.5% in the
1990s. Instead,
the critics often point to real problems that immigration aggravates, like
bloated state budgets and reduced opportunities and wages for low-skilled
minorities. But then they pin the blame entirely on the worker influx - not
unlike trade critics who rightly complained of disturbing economic inequality in
Mexico, but wrongly implied that NAFTA was the primary culprit, not simply a
policy that failed to cure it. Meanwhile,
supporters of immigration have been repeating mistakes from the trade debate
too. Many of us who fought for market opening back in the '90s made blanket
statements about its benefits for jobs and the economy while pooh-poohing or
ignoring its harsh impact on particular communities and groups of
workers. Supporters
also tend to gloss over the degree to which significant increases in immigration
can depress wages and even cost jobs of low-skilled U.S. workers. Harvard's
George Borjas and Larry Katz have found that between 1980 and
2000, predominantly low-wage immigration from Mexico depressed the wages of U.S.
high school dropouts by 7.7% compared with those of their college-educated
peers. While
there is no shortage of cases where increased immigration hurt a specific group
of low-skilled workers, few are as vivid or devastating as what befell
African-American janitors 25 years ago in Los Angeles. After seeing steady gains
through the work of their union, SEIU Local 399, the janitors were making a
solid $12 an hour in 1983 (equivalent to about $24 an hour today). Then nonunionized companies using workforces
94% made up of illegal immigrants earning less than $4 an hour stole away the
best contracts. The
result, according to a Government Accountability Office report, was that
unionized black janitors saw their ranks collapse from 2,500 in 1977 to 600 in
1985 - with only 100 still making top wages. Yet the woes of such groups may get
lost in the wash in large economic studies. Acknowledging
immigration's impact on low-skilled workers is not a call to close U.S. borders,
deny our heritage as a nation of immigrants, or ignore immigration's
compellingly positive effect on prices and productivity. Rather, it is
recognition that, as with aspects of trade, we need to offset the harm that
tends to concentrate on those who are already most vulnerable to economic
change. For
low-income workers affected by immigration, buffering the costs could mean
raising the minimum wage or expanding effective programs for at-risk minority
youths, like the Job Corps, which takes disadvantaged kids out of their
neighborhoods for intensive training and education. Business
advocates as well as advocacy groups for Hispanics and African Americans might
also propose boosting the earned income tax credit both for individuals and for
families with more than two children. Today this subsidy doesn't provide extra
help for larger families or offer more than a few hundred dollars to the
childless working poor. Enhancing it might keep these folks out of poverty,
compensate for wage losses they may suffer from greater immigration, and provide
a stronger incentive for them to stay in the
workforce. Addressing
real harms to vulnerable workers is a far better course than either turning our
backs - or shutting America's doors. Gene
Sperling is a former National Economic Advisor, Senior Fellow at the Center for
American Progress, and author of "The Pro-Growth Progressive"
(2005). http://money.cnn.com/2006/04/17/magazines/fortune/immigration_fortune_050106/ Related NYT 041606: Cost of illegal immigration may be less than meets
the eye Even economists striving hardest to find
evidence of immigration's effect on domestic workers are finding that, at most,
the surge of illegal immigrants probably had only a small impact on wages of the
least-educated Americans an effect that was likely swamped by all the other
things that hit the economy, from the revolution in technology to the erosion of
the minimum wage's buying power. When Mr. Borjas and Mr. Katz assumed that businesses reacted to the
extra workers with a corresponding increase in investment as has happened in
Nebraska their estimate of the decline in wages of high school dropouts
attributed to illegal immigrants was shaved to 4.8 %. And they have since
downgraded that number, acknowledging that the original analysis used some
statistically flimsy data. Assuming a jump in capital investment, they
found that the surge in illegal immigration reduced the wages of high school
dropouts by just 3.6 %. Across the entire labor force, the effect of illegal
immigrants was zero, because the presence of uneducated immigrants actually
increased the earnings of more educated workers, including high school
graduates. For instance, higher-skilled workers could hire foreigners at low
wages to mow their lawns and care for their children, freeing time for these
workers to earn more. And businesses that exist because of the availability of
cheap labor might also need to employ managers. Mr. Borjas said that while the numbers were
not large, the impact at the bottom end of the skill range was significant. "It
is not a big deal for the whole economy, but that hides a big distributional
impact," he said. Others disagree.
"If you're a native high school dropout in this economy, you've got a slew of
problems of which immigrant competition is but one, and a lesser one at that,"
said Jared Bernstein of the
Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group. Mr. Katz agreed that the impact was modest,
and it might fall further if changes in trade flows were taken into account
specifically, that without illegal immigrants, some products now made in the
United States would likely be imported. "Illegal
immigration had a little bit of a role reinforcing adverse trends for the least
advantaged," he said, "but there are much stronger forces operating over the
last 25 years."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/16/business/yourmoney/16view.html ALSO
SEE Q&A: Illegal workers and the US Economy
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5312900 Replacing the undocumented
workforce http://www.americanprogress.org/site/apps/nl/content3.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=1002793&ct=2145825 |
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