More “mainstream” media misinformation:
Republican rhetoric on immigration has not caught up . . . to the reality that the U.S. economy, like other Western economies, cannot function without low-wage, low skill labor, which Mexico has supplied. An estimated 7 million-plus undocumented immigrants, most of them Mexicans, are employed in this country. Mr. Trump’s fantasies of mass deportation notwithstanding, they will not be replaced by native-born Americans. At some point, Republicans will need to grapple with that reality. — Editorial Board, Immigration in Reverse, Washington Post 1/24/16
Fact Check: This statement reflects the commonly-heard claim that illegal aliens are doing jobs that Americans don’t want to do. That in the great majority of cases simply isn’t true. According to the Census Bureau, native-born Americans are the majority of workers in almost every occupational category. Thus when immigrants, legal and illegal, enter those fields, they are competing with Americans. One exception is agriculture, and illegal alien advocates commonly point to it in their arguments against effective immigration law enforcement. “The crops would rot in the fields,” they often repeat. That claim notwithstanding, it’s important to consider that at most only five percent of illegal aliens work in agriculture. The remaining 95 percent could be sent home with no effect on the crops.
It’s not as if we don’t have people available to work. In the age bracket between 25 and 65 we have more than 21 million people who are officially unemployed, people who can’t find full-time employment, and people who have given up looking for employment. Could some of them be enticed to do low-skill labor? But why should it have to be low-wage? Without illegal aliens in the workforce, wages for those jobs would increase, thus making them more attractive to Americans.
Another source of U.S. workers could be teenagers who typically in the past took low-skill jobs, and thereby gained experience which helped them when they entered the workforce as adults. Many teenagers still follow this path, but their employment rate in recent years has hit record lows. One reason is that illegal aliens have taken many of the jobs they commonly did. Sending illegal aliens home would end this harmful and unfair competition with our young people.
Another point to keep in mind is that the United States and other Western countries are on what appears to be the cusp of a great advance in automation. Within the next two decades, according to a study done at Oxford University, almost half of the jobs in the U.S. now done by humans will be automated. Thus, most likely, we will have much less need for low-skilled labor. One area where automation shows great promise is agriculture, where robotic crop pickers are beginning to replace farmworkers.
Unfortunately, the rhetoric of the Washington Post editorialists has not caught up with these realities. Perhaps it would if illegal aliens were taking jobs from American journalists.