Lamentations over the horde of illegal immigrants into this country rarely take notice of the fundamental cause. Even trained economists are guilty of this particular oversight, leaving out the most significant term in the immigrant supply and demand equation. While the immigrants flaunt the virtually unenforceable U.S. entry laws, their employers flaunt the unenforceable U.S. labor laws. This situation is a classic example of the rule of law, economic over political.
There is shortage of labor in this country. There always has been. In a more primitive time, it was an excuse for chattel slavery. But such a shortage is symptomatic of a growing economy usually considered a boon to humanity.
Nowadays, the national labor shortage is exacerbated by government price controls on labor such as wage and hour standards and union shop statutes. In addition, government subsidizes draconian birth control measures including late-term abortion and other means of discouraging domestic population growth. Thus, even if the United States was alone in the world, its growing economy (as long as it lasts) will likely produce shortages in the legal supply of labor. At the same time, such shortages contrast with surpluses in the legal demand for labor as evidenced by the government's unemployment statistics.
However, the United States is not alone in the world. The labor shortage in this country has come to the attention of people in other countries where economic growth is unknown. Many of these people are attracted by the opportunities for dignified and economically rewarding employment that is out of their reach in their own country. This situation is evidenced in part by rampant but illegal hiring of illegal residents in this country.
Minimum wage and labor standards laws have priced legal labor out of the market for economically marginal jobs because of competition from welfare and unemployment entitlements. This is a classical case of price supports leading to surpluses, subsidies leading to indigence. The labor surplus is evidenced by persistent unemployment of people who can live as well or better on welfare handouts than on legal wages for work they may not even qualify to perform economically.
Black-markets exist wherever there are volitional demands for certain goods and services that have been legally prohibited and are satisfied only by methods and means condemned by law. Like moonshine during Prohibition, there is now a black-market for labor in this country. It is illegal for people to work for what many businesses are willing to pay to remain viable. Meanwhile, even less pay may be attractive to many non-natives who cannot find productive employment where they live legally. While domestic labor contemplates the hypothetical question "which would you rather have, a job at $2/hr or no job at $10/hr?", the immigrant scrambles to work for what he can get and hustles to keep it up. Economic realities that elude urban labor union aficionados are obvious to sojourners from rural Mexico accustomed to $2/day when and if they can get anything at all.
It may sound strange to a penthouse Bolshevik but many foreign nationals consider this country’s legally minimum wage a king’s ransom. Never mind fringe benefits and welfare and education entitlements. What the stealth residents can get from the government is a minor lure compared with honest wages. But, of course, they, like anyone else, will take what they can get. This is also rule of law.
Only the owner of a business is legally permitted to work for less than the minimum wage and no fringe benefits. Businesses that depend on more than the owner's labor may not be viable paying legally mandated wages and fringe benefits to their workers. They may not be competitive in a global economy (read Walmart) with a legal labor force, let alone a unionized one. Not even Walmart can compete with a union labor force.
Would this country be better off without marginal businesses dependent on low cost labor? One might think so from the look of public policy on the subject. But I have doubts about it since I would not be here now but for the struggles of a small entrepreneurial operation that nurtured me as a child growing up in provincial Alabama during the depths of the Hoover-Roosevelt depression years.
Illegal immigration is commonly blamed for the country's perceived loss of national security, whatever that means. However this much is clear – illegal immigration was not a factor in the Wahabbis 9-11-01 Kamikaze attack on Americans. Those hijackers and murderers entered this country in strict accordance with its laws regarding entry. They were not looking for work at all. Had they come here with the express purpose of finding gainful work, they would have been denied entry by the first immigration officer they encountered. But they were not looking for work, only workers to kill. Apparently, such motives are not the concern of immigration law writers.
Curiously, if to find work had been the avowed purpose of the al Qaeda hostiles’ visit to this country, the law would have denied them entry, not because of their enemy affiliation but because the immigration laws do not allow visitors from abroad to do honest work here. Indeed, a young person cannot legally enter this country to work. So much for the "Promised Land."
Nature has ordained that labor is an economic commodity. It has its price like anything else. The price of labor is a cost that must be covered by the price of the goods and services it produces. Consumers accept or reject these goods and services at the prices offered to the delight or dismay of the producers who hire the labor.
Economists attribute grave mischief to the popular misunderstanding of prices. Especially egregious are the consequences of labor price ignorance. Generations have been ideologically corrupted and economically injured at the hands of so-called progressive labor politicians. Immigrant life and death is daily testing labor price fallacies.
September 8, 2005
