Immigrants "stealing our jobs"

[piercehawkeye45]

Ibram posted the picture I was thinking of. Maddox's stance makes a lot of sense too, force companies to pay every worker, illegal or not, minimum or above minimum wage and the incentive to higher illegals lessens. That is obviously idealistic though.

Immigrants are not taking American jobs, they are over-competing us for them. I really don't see this as anything more than a flaw or downside in the free market system. Foreign workers are willing to work for less pay than most regular Americans so companies and corporations, that make decisions based on profit, will obviously hire the immigrants, a lot of times illegal, over American workers.

In order to solve this problem, assuming that we want to legal American citizens to have jobs over illegals, Americans will either have to be willing to out compete the illegals, stop the illegals or immigrants from coming into our country, create more jobs, or allow state intervention.

Besides disagreeing with forcing Americans to out-competing the illegals on a socio-economic level, it will bring down the standard of living for the working and middle class and make the rich even richer, something that I cannot imagine being good for the economy or society in general.

I am very ignorant in this field but I'm pretty sure creating jobs is not easy and has some major drawbacks to it but not sure.

I am against creating a wall or blocking up the border because I see it as unrealistic. The cost of it is enormous, some estimates up to a million to ten million a mile [1] and will need constant upkeep. Besides that, the elite (the rich, CIA, etc) will not allow it.

That comes down to state intervention, which can be seen by either forcing equal pay to all workers, even illegals, or cracking down on companies that hire illegals. The first solution is good, but if you are going to do that you might as well do the second and we have seen that the second idea hasn't been working well because of reasons seen in the last paragraph.


The best idea I have is that we don't build the wall, open immigrant restrictions which will lower the amount of illegal immigrants because I am willing to bet most immigrants were breaking the law on a rational decision so if given the opportunity, they will come in legally. This obviously doesn't solve the problem but it at least will ease it. Besides that, trying to increase state intervention on companies or corporations or trying to stop illegal immigration at the source would help as well.



[1]http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/...720_page_3.htm