The Jobs Americans Won't Do

We hear it all the time. We need illegal alien migrants to do the jobs Americans don't want to do. Is that really true, though?

The standard line is "Who will pick the strawberries and tomatoes and work in the fields if we deport all the illegals?"

Anyone who has been on a modern farm or orchard knows that is a bogus argument. It might have been true 50 years ago, but modern agriculture is highly automated. Gone are the days of 40 acres and a mule. Huge farms in the Great Plains region use GPS guided tractors, cultivators, and harvesters, along with many other automated systems. Only about 4% of the population now feeds not only the country, but a large part of the world.

Even in California where there are lots of fruits and nuts, as well as food that grows on trees, the need for unskilled manual labor is minimal. Grapes in vineyards are mostly machine harvested with wire guided harvesters and optical recognition systems. Likewise for tomatoes, and almost every other vegetable. Even where there is still significant manual labor involved, it is typically seasonal, or two to three times a year.

The labor input in agriculture today is a tiny fraction of what it was many years ago, yet the Left (read Democrats) count on urban ignorance of modern agriculture to parade their false claims of a need for agricultural labor to support their objections to deportation. Most of the real labor needs in agriculture are served by skilled American labor, aka, farmers and skilled American farm workers.

So if it isn't farm labor that provides employment for illegals instead of work that Americans won't do, what other possibilities exist? About all that is left is services. You know, things like domestic services, hotel and motel cleaning and food service, landscaping, and eldercare. A few semi-skilled trades in construction, meat processing, among others are also candidates.

Why would there be a lot of illegals in those occupations? Are these jobs beneath American workers? Might there be something else at work, here?

Consider, for a moment, what it takes to legally hire someone. California minimum wage is just under $17/hr but many states and municipalities have higher levels. Just for discussion, assume a job that pays $20/hr. To legally hire someone, they have to be in the system, either as a US citizen, or a green card holder, or a few other legal exemptions. That means they will be subject to employment regulations, Federal, State, and Local, including taxes.

A legal employee earning $20 an hour will have Social Security, Federal withholding, State withholding, and possibly local taxes withheld. They may also have deductions for medical and insurance, and potentially other employment expenses. They will be lucky to take home $16 per hour, or about $2,000 per month. Out of that, they will have to pay for housing, food, clothing, transportation, and any other expenses. If there is anything left at the end of the month, it will likely go for some emergency like medical, car repairs, or something else.

If an employer provides housing or food, the IRS considers that income provided to the employee to be charged at fair market value, and for which the employee will be taxed. The employee will still need cash income to pay the taxes, and many places will consider room and board as part of the minimum wage, even if no cash is provided. 

An employer will have additional expenses beyond the $20 per hour pay. They will have the employer's half of the Social Security payment, unemployment insurance, and likely various medical and other benefits they may provide. The employer may also provide tools, a workspace, and other overhead items. All these employer costs can easily add another $10 or even $20 or more per hour to the direct cost of the employee.

Furthermore, the employer has to report payroll and tax information to various authorities, and can suffer severe penalties if the information is not accurate. They also have to comply with all the workplace requirements for disabled employees, safety, working hours, and a myriad of other rules and regulations.

On the other hand, there are lots of advantages to hiring illegals. First off, they are not "in the system", so the employer can pay them considerably less and they don't have the overhead of a legal employee. Many employers may not even be businesses with regular business licenses, tax IDs and other connections to the system. Even for regular businesses, workers paid in cash may not be reported, so even if there is an expense, it is likely less than the overhead expenses of a regular employee, so there is a net gain to the employer. In many cases, workplace regulations can also be ignored with significant savings.

Following the example of a legal employee above, if an employer pays an illegal in cash the $16 per hour that the legal employee would take home, they get the same amount of labor at less than half the cost. The illegal will still have their own expenses, but if they group together with other illegals, they can share housing costs, food, transportation, and other expenses, so that $2,000 per month goes much further. Both the employer and the illegal win.

The situation is even more severe for domestic services such as maids, gardeners, handymen, nannies, in-home nursing care, among others. People with mother-in-law cottages, basement apartments, or even a spare room or two can provide housing and even board to an illegal as part of their compensation. They don't have to declare that as income to the illegal, since they aren't reporting the employment anyway. They can then pay the illegal a small "allowance" to cover personal expenses that will be much less than any regular employee would accept.

The illegals are unlikely to object and are very easy to control. The employer can simply threaten to report them to ICE for deportation to ensure obedience. A wide range of domestic and even bedroom services can be obtained in this way, and the illegal is little more than a house slave.

The Democrats have a long history of endorsing and supporting slavery, and often justify it as "helping" people. They are providing poor illegals with food, shelter, and an income better than they had in their home country, and are giving them an opportunity to live and work and even educate their children in America. Think of all the good they are doing!

The employer benefits by getting services they could never afford if they had to hire regular citizen workers, and it gives them lots of free time for other activities, such as organizing protests and political activism. Even if they get caught hiring illegals, there is generally little or no penalty. They may suffer a period of inconvenience until the attention of authorities is directed elsewhere, and they have to find new illegals to enslave, but that is a minor problem.

No wonder that Democrats are so opposed to deporting illegals! Think of all the services they get at trivial expense. If they had to wash their own dishes, clean their own houses, care for their own children, take care of their elderly they might not have time for all the other activities that give their lives such meaning and importance.

They would be just like all those Republican saps who want to do things legally and are too stupid to take advantage of the situation. Employing illegals gives the Left time and money to right wrongs, correct inequity, save the planet , ensure justice, invent new rights, dispense other people's wealth, and generally make the world a "better" place. Who wouldn't want that.

No, it is not that Americans don't want to do the work that illegals are doing. The situation is much worse than that. No citizen can afford to take a job at the rate and conditions illegals are forced to accept, and no legal employer can afford to pay a legal employee for the same work.

In order to afford an employee, that employee must contribute value to the employer that exceeds the expense of employment. If an employer pays more than that, they risk going out of business. Employment of illegals lowers the cost of the employee, and even enables work that would otherwise not be done, such as many domestic services. That makes it hard for legitimate businesses and employers to compete with those who do not obey the law.

Aside from rewarding illegal activities, the situation fosters an attitude that a law only applies if you get caught - an attitude extremely destructive to a civil society. The unfair competition of illegal employment ensures that American workers will never get the opportunity to take these jobs, even if they want them. Think of it as internal outsourcing, with the same effect on American workers that outsourcing of manufacturing, programming, and other jobs has had.

Deporting criminal illegals is a good first step, but eventually, all must go. Yes, we want legal immigration, but tolerating a mass influx of illegal immigration is destructive in many ways, not just economically. Failing to enforce our immigration laws sends the message that our laws are not to be taken seriously, and every law becomes vulnerable. If we are to be a nation operating under rule of law, then we must enforce the laws we have. If we don't like those laws, then we have mechanisms to change them, but we cannot afford to ignore them or worse, flagrantly disregard them.

A democracy cannot function without law and law cannot function without agreement. Democrats and other Leftists have been claiming for years that America is a nation subject to the rule of law and how democracy is under siege by those who they say violate those laws. Seems about time that they take a good look in the mirror and start listening to what they have been saying.

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