By Rick Oltman, May 24, 2018
Illegal alien workers depress wages. In response, over 12,500 people have recently signed a petition calling for “President Trump to immediately sign an executive order making E-Verify mandatory for all U.S. businesses, no exceptions.”
The Petition is dated May 14, 2018, which means over 1,000 people a day have signed it.
In April 2017, the Los Angeles Times published a report by Natalie Kitroeff that disclosed when illegal aliens began flooding the California construction industry, wages drastically dropped. The title and subtitle tell it all, “Immigrants flooded California construction. Worker pay sank. Here’s why.” “Construction in Los Angeles has shifted from a heavily unionized labor force that was two-thirds white to a largely non-union one that is 70% Latino and heavily immigrant.”
Labor is a commodity. The price of that commodity is called wages. When the supply of a commodity increases, the price decreases. This is a clear example of the law of supply and demand.
Construction job wages started at $45 an hour in California in the late 1980s. The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was signed into law in November, 1986, and it started the illegal invasion. Today, thirty years later, those same job wages start at $11 an hour. Between 2008 and 2016, construction wages were approximately 40% lower than in 1998.
The downward trajectory in wages has been experienced in all low-skilled and entry level jobs.
Meatpacking jobs in the Midwest experienced wage decline from about $20 in the 1980s to $12 an hour in the 1990s.
In 2000, a retired U.S. Border Patrol agent and I visited a Nebraska town whose biggest employer was a meatpacking plant. We rented a cheap motel room where illegal plant workers were known to stay and sat outside with a couple six-packs of cervezas (Spanish for beer). In the late afternoon, the dayshift workers began returning to their rooms and were invited to join us for a drink. My friend spoke fluent Spanish, and before the beer was gone, we learned that these workers, all from Mexico, were new to the plant. They were all illegal aliens who told us that the company that owned the plant picked them up in Texas and then drove them in a van to Nebraska. They were put up in the motel at company expense until they received their first paycheck, and were then on their own to secure living quarters. This was the model for employing illegal aliens in the meatpacking industry all over the Midwest.
With mandatory E-Verify, the hiring of illegal aliens would screech to a halt. It is computer based, and verification is at the speed of light in most cases. Those employed would be confirmed to be American workers or legal immigrants with a valid work visa.
The petition states, “Americans want the rule of law enforced NOW. This petition calls upon President Trump to immediately sign an executive order making E-Verify mandatory for all U.S. businesses, no exceptions.”
I would add to that, mandatory E-Verify for all employers, including federal, state, and local governments.
I like to imagine the response of the sanctuary supporting governments.
You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life. [Winston Churchill.]
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