The Jobs Americans Won’t Do

The justification for the President’s temporary worker program is that there are some jobs that American’s just won’t do.

Farmers argue that they need unskilled immigrant workers because without them, crops will rot in the fields and food prices will skyrocket. In California’s San Joaquin Valley in 1960 under the Bracero guest worker program 56,000 unskilled Mexican farm workers picked 2 million tons of tomatoes. When that program ended in 1964, did crops rot in the fields? Did ketchup become a luxury good?

Of course not. Farm owners started to invest in automation. The result was that 5,000 high skilled, high wage workers were able to harvest 12 million tons of tomatoes. Nearly six times the harvest with one tenth of the workforce. Put another way, that’s a productivity increase of over 6,000%. If our health care system had that kind of productivity increase, we wouldn’t be worried about the future of Medicare.

It’s a perfectly understandable pattern. American industry has little incentive to invest in labor saving automation as long as there is an unlimited supply of low skilled, low wage workers.

But what about jobs that can’t be automated? If we don’t import cheap, unskilled immigrant labor, who is going to clean our hotel rooms?

If low wage immigrant workers were not available, Hilton would not close it’s hotels. They would respond to supply and demand in the labor market and pay a U.S. worker trying to support her 3 kids the $15/hour she needs to pay the mortgage and finish her education.

Low wage immigrant labor does not make these jobs possible. It just makes them possible at low wages.

The other argument for a temporary worker program is that if we give people a legal channel to work in the U.S., there will be less illegal immigration. It will reduce pressure on the Border Patrol and let them focus their resources on the few people still trying to cross the border illegally.

There’s just one problem with this argument. It’s called math.

A 2005 Pew Hispanic Center national survey showed that 46% of Mexicans would cross the border into the United States if they had the opportunity. Out of a population of 109 million, that makes 50 million Mexicans who with varying degrees of intensity, want to come here. Subtracting 400,000 legal guest workers, still leaves 49.6 million who want to come here and are willing do it illegally.

A guest worker program can only reduce illegal immigration if it absorbs a large fraction of the pool of potential illegal immigrants. Given that the population of Mexico, Central and South America is over half a billion, no temporary worker program can ever be large enough to put a meaningful dent in illegal immigration.

If the goal of a temporary worker program is to subsidize business with low wage workers, then it may have merit, but we need to be aware that there will be a price. That price will be reduced productivity and lower wages for U.S. workers.