One of the overlooked ways in which immigration harms the American workforce is displacement, that is, when established workers, whether natives or immigrants, lose their jobs to new immigrants, often illegal newcomers, who will work for substandard wages.
Sometimes the employer intentionally replaces natives with foreigners to have a cheaper, more easily exploited workforce.
Sometimes the displacement comes through an intermediary.
In these cases, work is let out to subcontractors.
The firms that use immigrants - and pay them low wages - underbid the firms that use natives.
In some cases, the ultimate employer may not even be aware that native workers have been displaced.
Regardless, the effects on Americans are real; as the Immigration and Naturalization Service put it:
“The critical potential negative impacts of immigrants are displacement
of incumbent worker groups from their jobs and wage depression for those who
remain in the affected sectors.”
.1
The web of complex interactions among factory openings and closings, choice of production methods, ethnic networking in hiring, and labor subcontracting make it difficult to prove iron-clad demonstrations of displacement.
Yet such evidence does abound.
Another clear case of displacement happened in the tomato industry in the 1980s. A group of unionized legal border crossers picked the tomato crop for many years in San Diego County, and were making $4.00 an hour in 1980. In the 1980s, growers switched to a crew of illegal aliens and lowered the wage to $3.35. Almost all the veteran workers who were unwilling to work at the reduced rate disappeared from the tomato fields.2
Sometimes those displaced by new foreign workers are other foreign workers. In the raisin grape industry of California, Mestizos (the Spanish-speaking population of Mexico were laid off and replaced with lower cost Mixtecs (the indigenous people of Mexico). According to a study of the industry, the Mixtecs “have driven the Mestizos out of the market.”3
Agriculture has many other instances of employers’ switching to immigrant workers (legal and illegal) to increase their profits. For example, Hispanic migrants have displaced native black workers in the Georgia peach industry4 and migrants have replaced natives and previous immigrants in the cucumber and apple industries in Michigan.5 The melon industry found it possible to replace unionized crews of mostly native workers doing manual packing in the field with lower-paid Mexican field crews in tandem with the introduction of mechanized packing houses.6
In the furniture industry, competition from immigrant-laden plants in Southern California, closed all the unionized plants in the San Francisco area and removed natives from the workforce in favor of lesser-paid aliens.7
In the last twenty years, the meatpacking industry has completely reorganized around the use of immigrant rather than native labor. IBP, the nation’s leading meatpacking company, now recruits workers from Mexico and directly along the border. As a result, the proportion of the labor force protected by union contracts and the share of natives in meat processing has dropped dramatically.8
Unions fall before the weight of imported labor. In the Mission Foods tortilla factory strike, management lowered wages by 40 percent, and when the native labor went on strike, the Mexican managers intentionally brought in recent immigrant strikebreakers to replace them. Some of the natives returned to work at the reduced wages, but most left.9
Similar phenomena have swept over the hotel industry as well, with immigrants workers displacing native black workers en masse.10 In Los Angeles, unionized black janitors had been earning $12 an hour, with benefits. But, with the advent of subcontractors who compose roaming crews of Mexican and El Salvadoran laborers, the pay dropped to the then minimum wage of $3.35 an hour. Within two years, the unionized crews had all been displaced by the foreign ones, and without any skills, the native force did not as a rule, find new work.11
Many politicians and some citizens do not concern themselves with such displacement since it affects primarily low-skilled Americans, who tend to lack political clout. As a result, immigration has been responsible for forty to fifty percent of the wage depression in recent decades.12 Some research estimates that nearly two million Americans a year are displaced by immigration.13
Americans deserve decent jobs at decent wages, not unfair competition from imported foreign workers who are exploited to the point of indentured servitude. We need immigration reform to stop the massive influx of foreign workers from doing further harm to the living standard of our low-skilled fellow citizen and legal resident workers.
FAIR, 10/99.
