US Border Patrol Agent Elizier Vasquez:
We’re fortunate enough to live in a country where there are lots of opportunities. And most of the people who we run into out here want to make that dream happen. Unfortunately, it’s our job to stop that dream. That’s what we do on an everyday basis.
Read Malia Politzer’s Reason piece on the US-Mexico border experience.
In Colorado, crackdowns on illegal immigration have caused a shortage of agricultural labor. So farmers have contracted with the state’s Corrections Department to have prisoners bring in the harvest , at the slave wage of about 60 cents per day.
NY Times story here.
Lant Pritchett, currently at the World Bank and previously at Harvard, has written a book on global labor mobility.
This strikes me as a terrible argument:
If we are really serious about turning back the tide of illegal immigration, we should start by raising the minimum wage from $5.15 per hour to something closer to $8. The Massachusetts legislature recently voted to raise the state minimum to $8 and California may soon set its minimum even higher. Once the minimum wage has been significantly increased, we can begin vigorously enforcing the wage law and other basic labor standards.
Millions of illegal immigrants work for minimum and even sub-minimum wages in workplaces that don’t come close to meeting health and safety standards. It is nonsense to say, as President Bush did recently, that these jobs are filled by illegal immigrants because Americans won’t do them. Before we had mass illegal immigration in this country, hotel beds were made, office floors were cleaned, restaurant dishes were washed and crops were picked — by Americans…
However, Americans won’t work for peanuts, and these days the national minimum wage is less than peanuts. For full-time work, it doesn’t even come close to the poverty line for an individual, let alone provide a family with a living wage. It hasn’t been raised since 1997 and isn’t enforced even at its currently ridiculous level.
Yet enforcing the minimum wage doesn’t require walling off a porous border or trying to distinguish yesterday’s illegal immigrant from tomorrow’s “guest worker.” All it takes is a willingness by the federal government to inspect workplaces to determine which employers obey the law.
Don Feder spews forth ignorant bile:
The Times claims “500 economists have signed an open letter to Mr. Bush arguing that immigration is a net plus for the nation’s economy.” Doubtless, the same 500 economists believe that tax hikes are a net plus for the economy, increases in the minimum wage are a net plus for the economy and signing the Kyoto Treaty on so-called global warming would be a big boost for the nation’s economy.
Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation analyst who – unlike the Times standard-issue 500 economists – is invariably right about the impact of legislation on the economy, tells us the following…
It was cruel of Feder to pit Mr. Rector, who holds a M.A. in political science, against five Nobel laureates and two former chairmen of the CEA, but it was outright laughable to imply that these 500 PhDs are a bunch of leftists. I’m sure Deepak Lal and Pete Boettke would be a bit surprised to be labeled as such.
[Hat tip: the letter’s author, Alex Tabarrok]
In part because people flows are smaller than trade and capital flows, the dispersion of pay for similarly skilled workers around the world exceeds the dispersion of the prices of goods and cost of capital. This suggests that policies that give workers in developing countries greater access to advanced country labor markets could raise global economic well-being considerably. The economic problem is that immigrants rather than citizens of immigrant-receiving countries benefit most from immigration. The paper considers “radically economic policies” such as auctioning immigration visas or charging sizeable fees and spending the funds on current residents to increase the economic incentive for advanced countries to accept greater immigration.
Interesting…
Jesse Walker explores the links between guest worker programs, illegal immigration, and exploitation.
[Hat tip: Ivan Janssens]
Trade Diversion 