[Marxism] MIGRATION-US: The Myth of Low-Wage Warfare

[Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

didn't have the website for this article; here it is in full.
Interesting that the progressive Steven Steinberg echoes the
nativist Camarota, director of a private right wing think tank.
Author believes however in the panacea of worker retraining,
the kind of reform allowed by neo liberalism.

rb

MIGRATION-US:
The Myth of Low-Wage Warfare
Analysis by Peter Costantini*

SEATTLE, Washington, Jun 7 (IPS) - How could it be that an influx of 
less-educated workers from
poor countries would not significantly harm low-income U.S. workers?

If the labour market were a zero-sum game, there might be fierce competition 
between them. But
experts say other factors compensate for increases in the supply of low-wage 
labour and soften its
effects.

"American labour markets appear to be rather segmented," according to Douglas 
Massey, co-director
of the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton University. "There are certain 
sectors where
foreigners enter and they complement Americans in production and don't really 
have any
displacement or wage effects."

Massey pointed to agriculture as the clearest example of this segmentation. 
There have been few
white farmworkers since the 1930s, he said. To attract them, employers would 
have to raise wages
considerably. But if they did this, the produce would end up being imported 
from abroad because
that would be cheaper, or farmers would find it economical to mechanise more 
jobs.

Although competition may exist in some areas between immigrants and native 
workers, its main
impact falls on a declining number of U.S. workers. Among all immigrants, the 
proportion who did
not finish high school is about 38 percent, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. 
For illegal
immigrants, the figure is closer to two-thirds. Of the U.S.-born workforce, the 
proportion of
high-school dropouts is much smaller, under 15 percent, and in urban areas it 
has fallen by more
than a quarter over the past two decades.

Low-wage immigrant workers may foster economic growth in the areas and 
industries where they work.

When firms profit from the cheap labour of immigrants, they sometimes respond 
by reinvesting that
money in expanding their production. When they do, this increased capital 
investment can create
new jobs.

Angelo Amador, director of Immigration Policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 
pointed to the
example of meat-packing in Nebraska. "The factories were closing and people 
were moving, there was
more unemployment and the wages were going down," he said in an interview.

"Once they had this influx of immigrants to work at these factories, some of 
the closed plants
reopened and the economy around the area actually picked up. And they found 
that the wages even
went up."

There is a potential multiplier effect, too: when an industry like meat-packing 
expands, it can
create jobs in firms that provide equipment, supplies and services to the 
industry.

In areas with booming economies, when workers are needed to fill jobs, 
immigrant workers can fill
gaps. Still, Amador said, there should be some guarantees that U.S. citizens 
will be able to
compete for these newly created jobs.

Certain kinds of jobs would likely have been moved out of the country had 
immigrants not taken
them at lower wages here. This is particularly true in agriculture and 
manufacturing, where U.S.
businesses are competing with Mexico and other developing countries.

By contrast, firms that employ immigrants may become more competitive in global 
markets. This can
enable them to expand rather than shipping the jobs overseas. "People focus on 
immigration," said
Massey, "but it's a globalised economy within which all factors of production 
except land are
moving."

In the U.S., wages for less-educated, lower-income workers have been mostly 
stagnant over the past
three decades. If immigration is not a major cause of lower wages and job 
losses, what are the
more significant pressures?

A ubiquitous factor has been the automation and reorganisation of work, which 
has relentlessly
reduced the demand for low-skilled workers in many U.S. industries.

In manufacturing, runaway shops, outsourcing and sub-contracting of some 
functions have eliminated
many manual jobs with relatively good pay and benefits over the past few 
decades.

But very little of this job loss can be attributed to competition from 
immigrants, who work mostly
in other sectors. The loss of such jobs has mainly been caused by the inability 
of U.S.
manufacturing firms to compete with foreign ones and by movement of their 
operations offshore.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof describes a neighbour he knew in his 
childhood who
earned 26 dollars an hour in a union job in 1971. For the last decade, he says, 
the neighbour has
had to work as a janitor for not much more than the minimum wage..

The long-term decline of labour unions in the U.S., often accelerated by 
union-busting, has also
helped depress wages on the lower end of the scale. U.S. labour laws that 
favour business and an
anti-union political environment have increased the difficulty of union 
organising among unskilled
workers, native and immigrant.

At the same time, the long-term decline in the inflation-adjusted value of the 
minimum wage has
moved the floor of the labour market downward.

Ruth Milkman, a sociologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, has 
found a
distinctive pattern in some industries, including construction and building 
services, now
dominated by immigrants in Los Angeles. These jobs had once been unionised, 
offered relatively
good wages and benefits, and were held overwhelmingly by U.S.-born workers.

Starting in the late 1970s, she told IPS, there was "a very direct employer 
effort to downgrade
them, mainly through destroying unionism". As the jobs became less desirable, 
native-born workers
often left voluntarily for the greener pastures offered by other sectors of a 
robust local
economy. Only after that process did employers turn to immigrants.

"So there really isn't any kind of story of competition there, it's an ethnic 
succession story,"
Milkman asserts. "Wages do go down, but I don't think it has much to do with 
immigration.
Immigration is a result rather than a cause."

For African-Americans, some particular factors do far more damage to their 
economic prospects than
competition from immigrants, argues labour economist David Card. A criminal 
justice system that
incarcerates large numbers of young black men, many for minor drug offences, 
leaves them with
bleak job prospects when they are released. Poverty-related medical issues such 
as diabetes and
congestive heart failure are exacerbated by lack of access to medical care 
because many have no
health insurance.

Many forces have conspired to reduce wages and job opportunities for those at 
the bottom of the
labour force. At the same time, many immigrants, legal and illegal, have 
entered the U.S. economy
over the past 15 years.

Not surprisingly, a study by Stephen Camarota of the Washington-based Centre 
for Immigration
Studies found that employment of low-wage immigrants rose while that of 
low-wage native workers
fell by more than twice as much from 2000 to 2005.

But according to Harry J. Holzer, former chief economist at the U.S. Department 
of Labour, these
findings "do not prove that the former development caused the latter." Rather 
than competition
from immigrants, Holzer attributes the employment situation of native-born U.S. 
citizens primarily
to "the underlying weakness of the U.S. labour market".

As Holzer testified before Congress, "Of course, some less-educated Americans 
have been hurt by
immigration, and more importantly by many other forces in the U.S. labour 
market -- such as new
technologies, foreign trade, the diminishing presence of unions, and the 
decline in the statutory
levels of the minimum wage."

Rather than trying to curb immigration, Holzer suggested, low-wage workers 
would benefit more from
improving education and training, increasing the minimum wage, making it easier 
to organise
unions, and providing more widespread child care, parental leave and health 
insurance.

The U.S. could also take a lesson from the integration of Spain, Portugal and 
other poorer
countries into the European Union, suggests Carlos Gil, emeritus professor of 
history at the
University of Washington.

"The Europeans created a social fund for worker-retraining programmes after 
they opened their
national borders and created one single market. Why can't we look for similar 
approaches?"

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