Want to Win the Immigration Debate? Start Talking About Illegal Jobs

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The often-overheated immigration debate is a distraction that draws attention from far-reaching problems facing American workers, particularly those on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder.

Many immigrants' right advocates argue that newly arrived workers take jobs that Americans won't do. That's only partially true; many unauthorized immigrants fill nonunion jobs that are impossibly crappy, pay poverty wages and are rife with workplace violations, and they work those jobs side-by-side with millions of natives and legal residents. The reality is that there are not enough Americans who are willing or able to tolerate poverty wages and other workplace abuses.

Understanding that dynamic can lead to a radically different approach to the issue -- to different methods of decreasing the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States and of regulating the flow of new immigration in the future.

Anarchy

Those who advocate more law enforcement to tackle the immigration issue often invoke images of America descending into anarchy -- of a nation losing control of its borders and, therefore, its sovereignty. Many blame "Big Business," believing that the corporate world, through its congressional lackeys, has pushed to "open" the borders to all comers in order to keep wages low and assure a steady supply of cheap labor.

That narrative is objectively false. For more than ten years, lawmakers from both parties have thrown billions of dollars into beefing up border security. In 1994, the United States spent just $550 million to guard its borders, but that figure quadrupled under Bill Clinton and then quadrupled again under Bush -- by 2005, it had increased to $7.3 billion, and most analysts expect the border security industry -- that's what it is, an industry -- to continue its strong growth.

During the same period, the number of illegal entries into the United States also increased significantly. Pumping billions of dollars into more patrols and installing all manner of shiny new security gizmos along our 2,000-mile southern border has only resulted in an increase in arrests, detentions and deportations, and a nice, fat profit for Department of Homeland Security contractors. It has had just about zero effect on the number of immigrants coming into the country, largely because the incentives for them to come here have been left untouched.

But the picture is reversed when you look at the enforcement of American workplace laws. While spending on immigration enforcement has gone through the roof, the resources allocated to enforcing overtime, minimum wage, workplace safety and other protections for workers have been cut and cut again.

There is anarchy in America, there is lawlessness, but you'll find a lot more of it in the kitchen of your favorite diner or on that gardening crew cutting your lawn, for example, than along the Rio Grande.

Consider the numbers. According to research conducted by NYU's Brennan Center for Justice (PDF), the number of workplaces that fell within the jurisdiction of the Department of Labor's wage and hour division more than doubled between 1975 and 2004, and the number of workers in those establishments increased by 55 percent. But during that period, the number of inspectors available to enforce basic labor standards declined by 14 percent, and the number of "compliance actions" the agency completed plummeted by more than a third.