One of the most important issues Americans will vote on in November when they go to the polls to choose their next president is immigration. Poll after poll has found it to be a top concern for voters, especially after President Joe Biden’s notoriously lax border policies that have allowed millions of illegal immigrants to flood across the border over the past three years.
This laissez-faire attitude toward illegal immigrants will no doubt be continued by Biden’s border commissioner, Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. But it’s not just Democrats who believe in open borders. Economists and many on the free-market right also believe that America should have a free market for labor, in addition to our free markets for investment, goods and services.
This view is problematic in many ways. Illegal immigrants depress working-class wages and compete with lower-income Americans for resources like housing, education, and health care. But there’s another reason why illegal immigration hurts American workers: The American labor market can never be a free market. While millions of immigrants come here to work, Americans generally aren’t free to return the favor. Fewer than six million U.S. citizens live permanently in other countries. That’s because most countries work hard to keep foreign workers out of their labor markets. Developing countries in particular know they can’t afford to let newcomers take scarce jobs.
The United States, on the other hand, is a paradise for foreign workers. There are currently over 50 million foreign-born people living here, or 15.5 percent of our population, the highest percentage in our entire history. Of these, 31 million are employed.
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During Biden’s time in office, as many as 3.5 million people managed to migrate here annually, mostly illegally. Unfortunately for working Americans seeking to achieve the American dream, these newcomers usually start at the bottom of the wage scale and compete directly with less-skilled Americans for entry-level jobs. America’s less-educated workers have traditionally relied on entry-level jobs like caregiver, construction worker or housekeeper. Because newly arrived migrants are often desperately poor, they accept poor pay and working conditions. Americans who need a living wage and decent working conditions are often displaced.
Take hotel housekeeping, for example. In a low-immigrant state like West Virginia, where less than two percent of residents are foreign-born, Americans still clean hotels. In high-immigrant areas, however, immigrants clean most hotel rooms, offices, and private homes. What do the Americans who used to do these jobs do? Displaced American housekeepers may find themselves forced out of their old jobs and have neither the training nor the skills to move into a better-paying job.
All too often, laid-off American workers drop out of the labor market altogether. That’s one reason why the labor force participation rate of native-born Americans without a four-year college degree has been declining steeply and steadily for two decades.
Why don’t laid-off American workers simply emigrate to other countries and trade places with foreign workers who come here? A major reason for this is the wage gap between American jobs and those in developing countries. Let’s stay with hotel maids. In the United States, hotel maids earn an average of $15.41 an hour, or about $32,000 a year. In Mexico, the country from which so many of our hotel cleaners emigrate, maids earn $2.75 an hour, or $5,720 a year.
Mexicans working in America send an average of 17.5 percent of their wages to Mexico, money transfers known as remittances. The typical Mexican maid sends about $5,600 home each year. Moving to America thus allows a Mexican migrant to receive an amount equal to their total salary if she had stayed in Mexico.
Even if an American were to emigrate to Mexico and work as a hotel maid, could he survive on $2.75 an hour? How much could he send home to his family from that wage?
The truth is that freedom in our international labor market is a one-way street. Millions of foreign workers are moving here to take jobs that still don’t require E-Verify, have few unions to protect people from cheap foreign competition, and have little government effort to help.
Americans who have become unemployed because of the federal government’s immigration policy have nowhere to go. There is no free labor market for them. America is the end of the line.
This is one of the main reasons immigration hurts American workers, yet it is the least reported, and it is incompatible with the concept of a free market economy.
Jim Robb is vice president of Alliances for NumbersUSA and author of Political Migrants: Hispanic Voters on the Move.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author.
