Cost of filling jobs 'Americans won't do' swamps us
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
As we go to press, there are more than 7.5 million Americans officially listed as “unemployed,” 5 percent of the workforce.
Anecdotally, there are said to be 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States.
A link connecting these groups is the idea that the immigrants are filling jobs which, as media people have been saying for years, “Americans won’t do.”
Does anybody but this writer find that odd? “Jobs that Americans won’t do”?
Liberals and demagogic politicians are forever prattling about alleged elitist trends in American society. But they seem unfazed that billions of dollars over time have been spent on welfare for jobless workers and billions more spent on their illegal immigrant replacements.
What could be more elitist than that a certain job is too coarse for an American citizen to take or be paid for not taking, but perfectly fine for a Latino or Asian immigrant?
In all of American history before the welfare state, there was no caste system. Working on farms, cleaning buildings, waiting tables, repairing things, driving taxis is what you did while waiting for opportunities.
If the jobs didn’t come to earlier Americans, earlier Americans went to the jobs.
Now during relatively good times we have 7.5 million people presumably looking for jobs, and some or all of 11 million jobs somebody apparently will do, just not Americans.
This writer long ago theorized that a nation which refuses to clean its own toilets is on a road to decline.
I noticed firsthand as early as the 1980s sections of Berlin near the then-wall crowded with Turkish immigrants; districts of northeast Paris overflowing with immigrants from Algeria and the Middle East.
Those first-generation workers weren’t causing anybody any problems. They were only too glad to be in Europe and have a job.
The discontent has come from following generations – children and grandchildren – less appreciative of entry level work, less bound by family, more easily drawn to resentments and peer grievances, more forgetful, or knowing nothing, of a hard life in the original country of the parents.
Events of the 21st century are proving that the succeeding generations of immigrants were, in effect, unfunded mandates on government for education, social acceptance and future prospects. Europe began long ago paying the burden of having billions in marks, francs, pounds and other currencies exported by immigrants who send parts of their wages to family members back home.
Such remittances are a double whammy. The funds sent abroad are lost to local economies. Living on half-salaries or less means the immigrant families are more likely to need government assistance for food, housing, medical assistance, education and other necessities. .
The United States is larger than Germany or France or England and it is more dynamic. So there is more margin for error on immigration, but not unlimited margin.
California is probably exhibit A. The state is said to lose as much as $15 billion yearly in immigrant wages sent home to Mexico. The state’s cities and counties are already famously swamped by the demands on governments for services. Millions of illegal immigrant families are scattered around the country and nobody seems to know what to do about it.
By allowing the notion that some jobs are simply, in effect, un-American, mobility is ruled out. Fluidity to go to where work is no longer provides the mechanism that allowed an unemployed city-dwelling American of the 1930s to go a small town farm where there was plenty of work.
Often it wasn’t well-paying and certainly not glamorous work. But it was a job. And the system collectively did not demand billions of dollars yearly to sustain unemployed people in places where no jobs are or are likely to be.
Nor did it require replacement immigrants to fill the essential jobs “Americans won’t do.”
December 2005
