Well its been a pretty slow day so when I came across this video I figured, hey, why not destroy a stupid lefty fallacy to pass some time? That stupid lefty fallacy? Illegal Immigrants only take jobs that Americans can't bring themselves to do.
Yea. Those are construction jobs. Good jobs not flipping burgers at a fast food place or mowing lawns or picking fruit or whatever the other illegal immigrant job stereotypes are.
Frankly all the jobs I just listed are all jobs that Americans will do (especially teens or college kids) but I think even the brilliant people who promote the idea that illegal immigrants are only doing jobs Americans wont do would have to admit that contracting and construction jobs are good jobs. They're jobs that are sought after and very often turned into careers. Plus they're "blue collar" and often involve unions so liberals must love them.
And so the absurd fallacy is revealed to be just that... and absurd fallacy. Illegal immigrants do all sorts of jobs and every single one of them could and would be done by someone who can be legally employed in this country. There is only one reason that employers hire illegal immigrants over legal workers.
Exploitation.
Just like the guys in the video most, if not all, illegal immigrants are compensated at a far lower rate than their legal co-workers. The whole point of hiring an illegal immigrant is the fact that they'll work for less. If that wasn't the case why would anybody ever take the risk of hiring someone illegally?
Sure, as things are now, overbearing and ineffective laws like minimum wage prevent Americans and legal immigrants from truly negotiating what they view as acceptable salaries with an employer and that creates much of the incentive to hire illegal immigrants. And, yes,changing our laws could tighten the gap between Americans' and legal immigrants' ability to negotiate their employment within the law and illegal immigrants' abilities to negotiate their employment outside of the law. But those who employ illegal immigrants will never be fully deterred by actions like that.
Those who hire illegal immigrants are, at the very least, more capable of manipulating their workers to get them to work for less than the going rate. Even a system where we are all free to negotiate our compensation with our employers won't completely solve the problem. Some manipulative employers would, inevitably, still prefer to take advantage of people who often don't speak English and are unaware of this countries customs and even their own rights.
So, while there are many indirect things we can do to decrease the incentive for employers to hire illegal workers and for people to enter the country illegally but the basic facts will remain. There will always be an incentive for illegal immigration. The illegal immigrants will always take jobs that would otherwise be filled by Americans and legal immigrants. Therefore illegal immigration will always hurt legal workers and will always need to be prevented.
We can either take the conservative approach of securing the boarders and enforcing the law or we can take the liberal approach of running the economy into the ground until we are less prosperous than the countries that illegal immigrants come from which would, obviously, kill their desire to come here. Either way the issue isn't going away anytime soon and it will continue to impact all of us not just people looking for crappy jobs flipping burgers.