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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…
Cases of Displacement
[A] 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.
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.”
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 industry and migrants have
replaced natives and previous immigrants in the cucumber and apple
industries in Michigan. 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…
Similar phenomena have swept
over the hotel industry as well, with immigrant workers displacing native
black workers en masse. In Los Angeles, unionized black janitors had
been earning $12 an hour, with benefits. But, with the advent of
subcontractors who [employ] 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. |