Illegal immigration: A businessman's perspective


Thursday, September 9, 2010


Illegal immigration threatens the economic health of our nation. If businessmen performed a cost-benefit analysis of keeping the border unsecured, they'd close the border as fast and as securely as possible.

When immigration policy was debated during the Bush Administration, the prevailing notion was that businessmen benefitted from the cheap labor provided by illegal immigrants. President Bush suggested there were jobs Americans weren't willing to do. When it came to cutting grass or cleaning hotel rooms, only Mexican laborers could resign themselves to such lowly work.

Besides being offensive to Hispanic Americans for obvious reasons, the assertion also was false. No honest work is beneath a man, as long as he is properly compensated. European Americans aren't "above" certain types of work, but they do expect a fair wage for their time and energy.

Most illegal immigrants enter our country sick, impoverished, and uneducated, having risked their lives fleeing a destitute, crime-ridden country. Unscrupulous employers are happy to offer them low-paying jobs without benefits. The illegal immigrant finds a better standard of living than he did in Latin America, even if his compensation is far lower than what a citizen or legal resident would require.

These employers think they're making out like bandits, acquiring a tremendous amount of labor at below-market cost. But costs cannot be avoided. You pay for things one way or another, and just because employers have lowered their workers' wages doesn't mean they're dodging costs.

On the contrary, they're incurring far higher costs in several different ways. Unfortunately for us, society at large feels the costs of cheap, immigrant labor as well.

Do you know anyone who is out of work right now? Odds are that you do. Unemployment is stalled at about ten percent and shows no sign of improving. The men and women searching for jobs would have a much easier time if the labor market weren't so distorted by the stream of new illegal immigrants.

In 2005, The Pew Hispanic Center estimated as many as 30,000 illegal immigrants lived in New Hampshire alone. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, New Hampshire currently has about 44,000 unemployed workers. If President Obama and his Congress want to get serious about unemployment, they should start by closing the border.

Jim Gilchrist, leader of the Minuteman Project and an endorser of my campaign, likens the businessmen hiring illegal immigrants to modern day slave traders. His assessment is spot on. They want to cheat people out of their due livelihoods, and bring all of us down as a result.

Imagine if an executive shut down one of his factories in the United States and moved it to Mexico, where he no longer had to pay his workers for the true value of their work. That's essentially what the employers of illegal immigrants are doing. They're taking jobs from New Hampshire and moving them to Mexico.

But the joke's on them (and on us). With a lower wage comes a lower quality of work. Also, they might not formally offer their employees health insurance or other benefits, but they still end up paying for their employees' health care — and at a higher cost than if they had offered benefits in the first place. Illegal immigrants are one of the main causes of rising health care costs. The services they receive at the emergency room are passed on to all of us in the form of higher hospital bills and higher taxes.

Illegal immigrants also bring a host of contagious illnesses, causing otherwise healthy Americans to require medical treatment. They've been linked to resurgences in whooping cough, tuberculosis, malaria, measles, and leprosy. It's not their fault — they simply weren't vaccinated as children, couldn't receive medical treatment in Mexico, and weren't screened before arriving in the U.S. If Democrats truly want to lower health care costs, there is no better starting point than closing the border.

As a final and lethal cost, the open border results in tremendous crime. It's not just aspiring workers crossing the border. Drug cartels, terrorists, and common criminals are also eager to enter the United States, and they do so very easily.

A company is of no value if its community is suddenly plagued by crime. Its best clients and customers will escape to safer ground, and its operations will be jeopardized by a breakdown in the rule of law.

In the private sector I was known as a "turnaround specialist." One of the keys to turning a company around is properly assessing and controlling its costs. Whatever benefits a businessman might receive from the open border, the costs clearly outweigh them.

We need to close the border so that it's secure and tight. Americans will be safer, healthier, and have more jobs available to them. That's the businessman's perspective I'll take to Washington.

Jim Bender
Candidate
Republican primary
U.S. Senate

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