Thread: Illegal immigrants are 'cheap labor' for some-costly to rest

Illegal immigrants are 'cheap labor' for some, costly to rest

Richard D. Lamm

It is easy to see why illegal immigrants are attractive to employers. These are generally good, hardworking people who will quietly accept minimum wage (or below), don't generally get health or other benefits, and if they complain they can be easily fired. For some employers it is an abused form of labor. Even minimum wage is attractive to workers from countries whose standard of living is a fraction of ours.

But that is not to say it is "cheap labor." It may be "cheap" to those who pay the wages, but for the rest of us, it is clearly "subsidized" labor, as we taxpayers pick up the costs of education, health, and other municipal costs imposed by this work force.

That has become a substantial and growing cost as the nature of illegal immigration patterns has changed.

For decades illegal immigrants were single men who would come up from Mexico or Central America alone, pick crops or perform other low-paid physical labor and then go home. They were indeed "cheap labor."

But starting in the 1960s these workers would either bring their families or smuggle them into the country later. They become a permanent or semi-permanent population living in the shadows but imposing immense municipal costs.

Illegal immigration today isn't "cheap" labor except to the employer. To the rest of us it is "subsidized labor," where a few get the benefit and the rest of us pay. These costs ought to be obvious to all, but the myth of "cheap labor" and "jobs Americans won't do" persists. But let us examine it more closely.

It is hard to get an exact profile of the people who live in the underground economy, but the average family of illegal immigrants has 2-4 school-age kids. It costs U.S. taxpayers more than $10,000 a child just to educate them in our public schools. Now, no minimum-wage workers, or even low-wage workers, pay anywhere near enough to pay for even one child in school. Even if they were paying all federal and state taxes, Colorado's estimated 30,000 school-age children of workers illegally in the United States impose gargantuan costs on other taxpayers.

The dilemma is compounded by the fact that approximately 50 percent of illegal workers are paid in cash, off the books. Go to any construction site almost anywhere in America, and you will find workers paid cash wages. Virtually every city in America has an area where illegals gather, and people come by to get "cheap" cash wage labor.

The health care cost of this "cheap" work force is also significant and subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. The total cost of this "subsidized" labor is impossible to ascertain and difficult to even estimate, but it is immense and growing as the number of these workers grows. A few benefit, many pay.

Americans pay in more ways than taxes. Cheap labor drives down wages as low income Americans are forced to compete against these admittedly hardworking people.

Even employers, who don't want to wink at false documents, are forced to lower wages just to be competitive. It is in many ways a "race to the bottom" fueled by poor people often recruited from ever more distant countries by middlemen who profit handsomely. Harvard professor George Borjas, an immigrant himself, estimates that American workers lose $190 billion annually in depressed wages caused by the constant flooding of the labor market from newcomers.

Let me suggest that correctly analyzed, the fight against illegal immigration is both a liberal and conservative cause.

The last two national commissions set up to study immigration, one headed by liberal icon Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, found that there was no moral or legal justification for this abused form of labor. Why aren't our politicians listening?

Richard D. Lamm is the former governor of Colorado.
http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/2 ... ile=search

There are the landlords who rent to legal and illegal immigrants sometimes 3 or 4 sets of people in one house. Often these immigrants are only allowed to use the house in sleeping shifts of eight hours period.

Maybe Americans have something to learn about survival, here.

Americans pay in more ways than taxes. Cheap labor drives down wages as low income Americans are forced to compete against these admittedly hardworking people.

Americans must learn to survive.

Is this why our government is overpopulating America; to teach us a lesson of greed and survival?

Great article, as always from Richard Lamm, former Governor of Colorado. Just look at the current low-life posing as the Colorado Governor and gnash your teeth that a true patriot and supporter of America and her citizens, richar Lamm, isn't still governor.