The Christian Science Monitor:
With people desperate for income, downward mobility may be on the way up. News reports show long lines of applicants for a janitor’s job or for work at a factory after a federal raid clears out the illegal workers.
Maybe it’s a myth that Americans won’t take certain jobs. In fact, a study by the Center for Immigration Studies used 2005-07 data to look at 465 occupations. Only four had a majority of immigrants in them: plasterers and stucco masons, agricultural graders and sorters, personal appliance workers, and tailors and dressmakers.
In every other occupation, such as janitors, maids, and groundskeepers, a large majority were filled by native-born Americans. The report’s conclusion: “The often-made argument that immigrants only take jobs Americans don’t want is simply wrong.”
The US job market is too dynamic to be easily segmented. Americans move too often for new jobs – more than a third live outside the state in which they were born. This recession can help bust the myth that native-born workers are too snooty to get their boots dirty in farm fields and back shops.
And, they point out, that may remove a key (mythical) plank for legalizing millions of illegal immigrants.
That would be a very interesting turn, would it not?
But, from where will the lefties get the millions of new voters they will need for elections in 2010 and 2012?
The idea that immigrants (especially illegal ones) fill jobs that Americans refuse to do is the main justification behind trying to find a way to gradfather in those that are already here (call it amnesty if you like). If that justification doesn’t hold water, there goes that whole idea – the American people just won’t stand for it under those conditions. I have been saying for years that there is a simple way to get rid of the illegal aliens – don’t hire them. If people won’t refrain from hiring them voluntarily (and we know many won’t because they’re to darn cheap to pay decent wages) pass laws that criminalize hiring illegal aliens and make the penalties so tough that people won’t take the risk. That way when ICE raids a business to scoop up the illegals they can scoop up the business owner and confiscate his/her assets, as well. That should make a major dent in employment for illegals. If they can’t make any money by coming here THEY WON’T COME ANYMORE. Arizona recently passed some laws that lean in this direction and there has been a mass exodus of illegal aliens leaving the state because they can’t find work and can’t make any money. Some have headed back to Mexico but many just crossed state lines into neighboring states where they can still make money. If we had FEDERAL laws that were effective in all 50 states there soon wouldn’t be any illegal alien problem.
Color me stupid, but what the heck is a “personal appliance worker”?
Have no clue on that one, BubbaB. A refrigerator defrosting assistant?