Maybe you’ve seen this show on the Discovery Channel called Dirty Jobs. As you can guess from the title, it features a good natured fellow who goes around the country learning about and doing the sorts of dirty jobs that like it or not must be done in this country.
I don’t honestly see how anybody can watch a whole episode of this show and still think there’s such a thing as “Jobs Americans Won’t Do.”
The current estimate is that there are 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States — a Senate proposal to allow 87,000 guest workers annually is nothing more than a paper parasol in a hailstorm. Most of the undocumented immigrants do their best to hold down jobs and follow the law except for the fact that they are here at all breaks the law. I have said before that we honestly have no way of telling whether they are just honest tax paying law abiding (except for immigration) folks trying to make a living or evil terraists and/or drug lords trying to do us harm. Nor do we particularly know how many of these people are living in poverty or are homeless — and would such people be included in, or over and above the reported statistics? But that’s not my point today.
My point is that these people hold jobs that could be held by a legal worker. The deliberately optimistic numbers released by the government* show that there are 7 million unemployed people who want jobs and another 1.5 million who are not actively looking for work but would gladly take a job if one came along. This says nothing of the millions of people who have been “retrained” from skilled labor to unskilled labor.
We are told Americans don’t want these jobs because these are low paying, low skill jobs. They involve hard work, long hours, and sometimes deliberately ignoring safety rules. The truth is that some employers want exploitable workers, and workers who fear they will be deported if they say anything are just perfect. Well it turns out that the people who have these jobs don’t much like that either.
The truth is that illegal immigrants are here because they can get jobs. We need to create incentives to businesses such that it’s easier and cheaper to improve pay and working conditions so Americans do “want” the job than to hire easily exploited foreign workers. Molly Ivins suggests jail terms for hiring illegal workers. It might make prices go up in a way that can’t be hidden in the Consumer Price Index, but we all benefit from having safe, decent paying jobs.
In closing: Joe Average can’t be a real voter because that house is owned by Joseph Average; How to Succeed in Retail; Greenspeak v. Bernankespeak, and New! Greenspeak for Kids!; and to paraphrase the classic children’s book Go, Dog! Go!, “Do you like my hat?”
* Under these criteria, just as an example, I am considered employed despite not having been paid to work because I “did at least 15 hours of unpaid work in a family-operated enterprise.” That means every high school kid who helps out after school at the family farm/teriyaki-stand/taqueria/store is theoretically “employed.”
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