Restating the Obvious

Field trials

The ICE raid at Honua Kai, and even more so the much bigger raid a few days later to Howard Industries in Laurel, Miss.,  should at least put one nail in one coffin of the endless immigration debate: that immigrants come to do jobs
that Americans won't do.

The illegals at North Beach were working construction and landscaping. You cannot tell me born-Americans won't take construction and landscaping jobs.

The Howard raid was even more interesting. Although the follow-up reporting that I have been able to find has been thin, the significant point was there in the first reports: Howard is at least partly unionized, and the union workers applauded as nearly 600 border-jumpers were hauled off.

Comments I found suggest the obvious: The native-born unionized workers believe that foreigners willing to work for low wages and low or no benefits are destroying their own standards of living.

No kiddin'. Only a tenured professor at the University of Chicago School of Economics could doubt it.

There are jobs that immigrants will do that native Americans are reluctant or unwilling to do. Stoop labor.

Immigrants don't want to do them either, and as soon as they are able they migrate (again) to more pleasant and better-paid working conditions.

Of course, if farmers paid more, then immigrants might stay with them longer, and locals would even want to work for them. We know this is true because we look out our windows and see born-and-raiseds working at HC&S.

If farm labor were paid high wages then the price of food would be higher. Americans do not want cheap food, however. We know this because of several lines of evidence.

We fork over about one-quarter of our food dollars eating out, very  expensive. Even when we eat in, we pay enormous premiums for processing; the farm gate price of the corn that goes into a box of corn flakes is around a dime.

The United States has always, except for one decade, been short of labor. I will have more to say about this in a  post on Labor Day.

But the idea that the borders must be thrown open because jobs need doing and Americans will not do them is nonsense.