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Current Events » in reply to "Jobs no American will take" - Sure!

So change the jobs
Robert — (archived)

You raise some interesting points, SDAITech1, but I think your essay suffers from being shoehorned too relentlessly into your anti-immigrant philosophy. While the symptom of the problem may be the presence of lots of illegal Mexican immigrants, that's not the root cause. Those immigrants, every one of them, made an eminently rational decision; they're looking at their economic environment and making the decisions right for that environment.

The way to solve the problem is to change the environment, not confront the immigrants directly with punitive measures like beefing up the Border Patrol. An essentially military solution across a couple of thousand miles of border will be hideously expensive and of dubious effectiveness.

Nor will "getting tough" with Mexico be particularly effective, I think. Modern Mexico's had a century to learn how to survive grafted on to America's southern flank, and we've tried to "get tough" with Mexico before. They'll dodge and weave and appear to comply, but in the end the situation won't improve.

Changing the environment means pricing menial jobs up so that they become more attractive to Americans; create a labor market in which the desperation of a Mexican immigrant is a less powerful advantage over American workers. Remove a lever by which American businesses can exploit Mexicans.

In other words, raise the damn minimum wage.

The classic arguments against raising the minimum wage involve increased costs for businesses passed on to consumers. Well, yeah, but wouldn't some "get tough" policy, if it had a prayer of working, also require expenditure of resources to put some teeth behind it? The military doesn't deploy for free, and Border Patrol agents don't work for free. "Getting tough" is a nonproductive drain on the economy, supported only by tax revenues; while restacking the deck by raising the minimum wage works by injecting money into the economy instead of taking it out.

If I'm wrong about that, I'd sure like to hear about a freemarket solution that solves the problem instead of makes it worse. We have an illegal immigrant problem because it's beneficial to business, so tell me how you make the problem go away without making illegal immigrant labor less attractive to business.

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