Time to dispel some economic myths

By David R. Francis, Christian Science Monitor

December 12, 2005

http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1212/p14s01-cogn.html

Quite a few dubious economic theses are floating around Washington these days. Such myths often affect public thinking and possibly alter economic policy....

Myth No. 2: Immigrants, legal or illegal, take the hard jobs that native-born Americans won't do.

Nonsense, says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington. If business paid them enough, he argues, native-born Americans would do the work many less-educated immigrants do.

In fact, US citizens fill most dirty or dangerous jobs that pay well - unionized coal miners, city sewer workers, and risky lumberjack jobs, for example.

Low-paying jobs that are mostly filled by immigrants include farm and yard workers, building custodians, and meatpackers. In the 1970s and earlier, slaughterhouse workers were primarily US citizens. But since then, the pay and benefits have declined enormously in real terms. Managers, seeking low-cost labor to boost profits, now hire many immigrants.

If wages in jobs now dominated by immigrants were raised, say from $6.50 an hour to perhaps $12 or $15, some jobs and business activities "would be priced out of the market," Mr. Baker notes. More householders would rake their own leaves. More vegetables might be grown in Mexico or Chile.

But certain jobs couldn't flee the country. Janitors living in El Salvador can't clean a Boston building. Transportation difficulties and costs would probably hinder putting a meatpacking plant in Mexico.

As it is, the inflow of immigrants in the past five years - half of them illegal - has been the highest in history, according to Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington.

These immigrants are finding work because native-born Americans like to get jobs done cheaply, or they believe that their fellow citizens won't do the jobs. This view affects policy as the nation enters another debate over immigration.

Baker notes that doctors and lawyers, with more political clout than low-wage workers, manage to have limits put on the number of immigrants in their occupations. Thus their professional incomes are not depressed by foreigners....

Myth No. 4: US workers aren't up to the demands of today's jobs. Many lack the skills and education needed.

...productivity in the US has been rising relatively fast. And Professor Handel points out that education levels have gradually risen. In the early 1960s, nearly half of all Americans had dropped out of high school, and nearly one-third of all young adults. Today both figures are under 15 percent....

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