Why There’s No Free Market for Labor in America | Opinion

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One of the major issues Americans will be voting on this November as they head 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 infamously lax border, which allowed millions of illegal immigrants to pour across the border over the last three years.

This laissez faire attitude toward illegal immigrants will no doubt be continued by Biden's border czar, Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee 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 when it comes to labor to go with our free markets in investment, goods, and services.

There are many problems with this view. Illegal immigrants drive down the wages of the working class and compete with lower-income Americans for resources like housing, education, and health care. But there's another reason illegal immigration hurts American workers: The American labor market can never be a free market. While millions of migrants move here for work, Americans are generally not free to return the favor. Less than six million U.S. citizens live permanently in other countries. This is thanks to the fact that most nations work hard to keep foreign workers out of their labor force. Developing countries, especially, know they can't afford to hand out scarce jobs to newcomers.

The U.S., on the other hand, is a paradise for foreign workers. More than 50 million foreign-born persons currently live here, or 15.5 percent of our population, the highest percentage in our entire history. Of those, 31 million hold jobs.

Migrants await to enter and seek asylum in El Paso, Texas, from Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, in Mexico, on April 2, 2024. An appeals court is scheduled to hear arguments on the constitutionality of Senate Bill... Migrants await to enter and seek asylum in El Paso, Texas, from Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, in Mexico, on April 2, 2024. An appeals court is scheduled to hear arguments on the constitutionality of Senate Bill 4 that would allow state law enforcement officials to detain and arrest undocumented immigrants suspected of illegally crossing into the United States. More CHRISTIAN MONTERROSA/AFP via Getty Images During Biden's term, as many as 3.5 million people each year have managed to migrate here, mostly illegally. Unfortunately for working Americans trying to obtain the American Dream, these new arrivals tend to start at the bottom of the wage tier and compete directly with lower-skilled Americans for entry-level jobs. America's less-educated workers have traditionally depended on starter jobs such as caregiver, construction helper, or housekeeper. Since newly arrived migrants are often desperately poor, they accept poor wages and working conditions. Americans requiring a living wage and decent working conditions are often displaced.

Take hotel maids, for instance. In a low immigration state like West Virginia, where less than 2 percent of residents are foreign-born, Americans still clean hotels. But in immigrant-heavy areas, immigrants clean most hotel rooms, offices, and private homes. What are the Americans doing who formerly did those jobs? Displaced American maids can find themselves priced out of their old trade and without the education or skills to move on to a higher-paying one.

Too often, displaced American workers fall out of the workforce altogether. That's one reason the labor participation rate for native-born Americans without a four-year college degree has been in steep and steady decline for two decades.

So, why aren't displaced American workers just emigrating to other countries and exchanging places with foreign workers who come here? A key reason is the wage differential between American jobs and developing countries. Let's stay on hotel maids. In the U.S., hotel housekeepers make $15.41 per hour on average, or about $32,000 a year. In Mexico, the nation from which so many of our hotel cleaners emigrate, hotel maids earn $2.75/hour, or $5,720 a year.

Mexicans working in America send an average of 17.5 percent of their wages back to Mexico, money transfers known as remittances. The typical Mexican immigrant maid sends about $5,600 home each year. So moving to America enables a Mexican migrant to send home an amount equivalent to her entire salary if she had stayed in Mexico.

Even if an American managed to move to Mexico and get hired as a hotel maid, could they live on $2.75 an hour? How much could they send home to their family on that wage?

In truth, any freedom in our international labor market is strictly one-way. Millions of foreign workers move here to take jobs where E-Verify is still not mandatory, where there are rarely unions to protect people from cheap foreign competition, and where the government rarely tries to help.

Americans driven out of work by federal immigration policies can go nowhere. There is no free market in labor for them. America is the end of the line.

It's one of the main yet most underreported reasons immigration hurts American workers, and is incompatible with a free-market view.

Jim Robb is VP of Alliances for NumbersUSA and author of Political Migrants: Hispanic Voters on the Move."

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

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Source link : http://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx?ref=FexRss&aid=&tid=66ccf47a0a2d425f98160bc588ba5585&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Fwhy-theres-no-free-market-labor-america-opinion-1944620&c=5566001926586068810&mkt=en-us Author : Publish date : 2024-08-26 10:09:00 Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source .

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