One of the most common and vexing arguments in public conversation today is the debate about the impact of immigrants on the labor force. The majority opinion, held by politicians and policymakers, writers and reporters, economists and academics, activists and business people, and even the general public, is that the U.S. “needs” immigrant workers. Their arguments attempt to “debunk” opposing views. Their facts, however, are actually myths, as this essay will show. But first, a full disclosure.
I am the grandson of Polish immigrants, the nephew of a Japanese and Canadian immigrant, and among the many friends I am blessed with are immigrants from Mexico, Central America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. I wouldn’t be here if it were not for immigrants, and therefore, I am pro-immigration. The United States needs immigration for biological and cultural diversity and a dynamic society. Furthermore, as the wealthiest nation on earth, we have a moral obligation to welcome people who have been driven from their home countries because of unlivable circumstances. You can rest assured, however, that we do not need immigrants for labor.
Let’s begin this analysis of pro-immigrant-workers arguments with a study by the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, Immigration Myths and Facts. The study encompasses all of immigration’s impacts on our society but includes some claims targeted at immigrant workers. Their report is comprehensive and representative of the majority of arguments favoring immigrant workers.
I agree with the USCoC that the following are myths and are mostly false: Immigrants hurt communities that are struggling economically; Undocumented immigrants do not pay taxes; Immigrants come to the United States for welfare benefits (where is this measured? I can’t find evidence but I believe this is primarily false); Today’s immigrants are not assimilating into U.S. society; Immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans; Reforming the legal immigration system will not help secure the border; Building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, and deporting all undocumented immigrants from the United States, would enhance national security.
Some of their pro-immigrant labor arguments, however, are false.
They label it a myth that “Jobs filled by immigrants are jobs that could be filled by unemployed Americans” and call it a fact that “Immigrants typically do not compete for jobs with native-born workers…” The Carnegie Corporation of New York concurs, “Fact: Immigrants don’t take American jobs…”
Their ‘fact’ is false. The most damning evidence that immigrants replace native-born workers can be found in Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data. From January 2020 until February 2024, 3.9 million foreign-born workers were added to the labor force, while 615,000 native-born workers were dropped. Foreign-born employment growth increased 14.5% over that period while the native-born workers decreased by .47%. This occurred as the Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) shrank from 63.3% to 62.5%.
The CoC calls it a myth that “The sluggish U.S. economy doesn’t need more immigrant workers” and calls it a fact that “Immigrants will replenish the U.S. labor force as millions of Baby Boomers retire.”
The BLS has a tool, the employment-to-population ratio (E-PR), that compares the size of the labor force to the entire population. While the whole population grows, so does the number of people employed. Both the LFPR and E-PR have been contracting since 2000. Three major factors and a half dozen minor ones are causing this. The big three, accounting for most of the decline, are demographics, offshoring/globalization, and technology/automation. Looking at demographics, the share of workers in their prime years is shrinking because of Boomer retirements and a declining birth rate. However, the overall workforce has been shrinking, so replacement doesn’t seem necessary. Furthermore, as discussed below, the replacement of native-born workers is a deliberate effort by corporate America for reasons other than Boomer retirements.
The CoC derides the “myth” that “During periods of high unemployment, the U.S. economy does not need temporary foreign workers” and instead claims, “Temporary workers from abroad fill specialized needs in specific sectors of the U.S. economy.”
The Federal government’s H-1B visa program allows U.S. employers to employ foreign workers in specialty occupations such as STEM occupations and other jobs in high tech, finance, law, medicine, etc., with duties specialized and complex, usually requiring a bachelor’s or higher degree.
The program sometimes fails to do what it was designed to do. High-tech companies use it to beat the system and hire foreign-born workers at lower rates. They use overseas employment companies to hire workers. What makes the operations of these companies so controversial is that, typically, they help American companies get around the H-1B law. These firms act as buffers that shield U.S. businesses from the reach of the law and beat the requirements of the H-1B visa, especially the payment of prevailing wages.
Consider this example: “Cisco Systems Inc. applied for about 3,000 H-1B visas in fiscal 2016, intending to hire people to work at its [San Jose campus]. These were good jobs … and they paid well.” The visa requests accounted for only 40 percent of the “jobs to be located at its headquarters. The rest were submitted by IT firms, mostly from India, seeking to place workers with the company — about 250 companies. The only indications that Cisco had anything to do with these applications were the addresses listed as the place of employment ... Silicon Valley companies don’t mention workers employed by contractors, also known as the contingent workforce, when discussing how they use the program, meaning the picture they give is incomplete.” Further, “almost all of these visa requests were for jobs requiring little or no specialized knowledge. The average salaries for those positions were about 25 percent lower than the jobs Cisco applied for directly.”
The Wall Street Journal reported, “a group of experienced American professionals is accusing an Indian outsourcing giant of firing them on short notice and filling many of their roles with workers from India on H1-B visas.” These professionals with MBAs or other advanced degrees allege in complaints to the EEOC that India’s Tata Consultancy Services is firing them by closing down units or projects to save money and to provide jobs to more Indian nationals in the U.S.
Many major corporations, including PayPal, Microsoft, Oracle, eBay, Googleplex, Facebook, IBM, Pfizer, AIG, and Disney, have applied for foreign visas for workers. The American technology industry argues that the visa program is vital to attracting foreign-born workers with rare technical skills. However, critics decry the visa program as a way for outsourcing companies to undercut the American labor market by paying low wages to mostly Indian-born workers. By far, India is the most popular source of skilled foreigners. Five large Indian firms dominate the industry of multinational temp agencies—Infosys, Wipro, Satyam, Tata, and Syntel Inc. In his book “Who Stole the American Dream?” Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Hedrick Smith lists many cases of this happening in corporate America. He estimates that over one million jobs have been lost to foreigners through onshoring.
The CoC calls it a myth that there is no shortfall of native-born Americans for open positions in the natural sciences, engineering, and computer science and, thus, no need for foreign-born high-tech workers. Using wage indicators, they support their claim that there’s a shortage of native-born STEM workers. In STEM jobs requiring higher education, it’s not a myth that there is no shortfall of STEM workers; in fact, there is a surplus. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York of recent (up to five years after graduation) college graduates looks at unemployment rates for those graduates by major. Most surprising is that unemployment rates for some STEM majors are actually higher than that for the whole population — 3.7%. For computer science, the unemployment rate is 4.3%; for aerospace engineering, 7.8%; and for miscellaneous technologies,6.4%. Overall, in December 2023, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates, ages 22-27, was 4.8% vs. 3.7 % for all workers.
Another mistaken belief is that we need immigrants for jobs Americans don’t want to do. A 2020 Pew Research poll found that “A majority of Americans say immigrants mostly fill jobs U.S. citizens do not want.” This point is primarily true. For the critical thinker, however, this line begs the question, “Why won’t Americans do certain jobs?” The quick answer is, “Because there is something wrong with the jobs.”
It’s simple. Americans expect a safe working place and fair labor standards. Thanks to the free market economy, there are always other job opportunities. Native workers have higher expectations for employment than immigrant workers might. Working conditions in the countries from which those immigrants come might be intolerable or unacceptable by American standards. Immigrants would be glad to take those jobs.
This belief, however, hides a morally troubling issue. The proponents of this claim are saying that some jobs are beneath us, that there is some work that we ourselves demand from the market but that we are too good to do. It’s like saying, “That food’s not good enough for me; give it to the dogs.” This belief casts shade on immigrant laborers as inferior and second-class.
Accepting the circumstance that immigrants mostly fill jobs US citizens do not want turns away from this abuse and directly enables employers to maintain unjust labor practices and/or unsafe work environments while, at the same time, treating immigrant workers in an inferior way.
The “need” for immigrant workers is a campaign pushed most vigorously by owners and capitalists themselves. They want, not need, a cheap and exploitable source of workers. They extol the virtues of immigrant workers by claiming, “They often work harder than native-born workers,” an insult to the work ethic of native workers. Yet, this is often true. The reason for that is simple. Foreign-born workers are easily exploited by their employers because of their naïveté. They are more likely to comply with their employers’ commands than native-born workers out of fear of losing their jobs or simply not knowing where the “line” has been crossed.
In 2017, Professor Nicole Hallet of the University at Buffalo Law School conducted a study on low-wage workers. She found, “Local low-wage workers experience high rates of legal violations. In all, 58.9% of low-wage workers reported at least one wage and hour violation, and 56% reported at least one potential health and safety violation.” Those violations include: making below the applicable federal or state minimum wage; not being paid overtime in violation of federal or state law; working off the clock without being paid; failing to receive their pay on time; handling dangerous materials or operating hazardous equipment as part of their jobs reported that their employer did not provide adequate safety or protective gear; and when complaining about their pay or working conditions to their employer reported suffering retaliation. These violations are happening all across the country every day. The above conclusions apply to her entire survey group, of which 15% were non-citizens. She does show that non-citizens suffer higher rates of violations: “Citizenship status also affected violation rates, with … 23.1% of non-citizens experiencing a minimum wage violation,” and “A full 61.5% – almost two-thirds – of non-citizens reported overtime violations versus only 30.2% of U.S. citizens.”
I heard about this exploitation directly from the employer’s perspective. At a party, I met a supervisor at a meat processing plant owned by one of the corporations in the monopsony, which processes 90+ percent of all the beef and pork in the US. Their local plant was hiring many Vietnamese immigrants when the unemployment rate in my city was very high. I asked, “Why do you hire so many Vietnamese immigrants when so many locals are out of work?” He answered quickly, “Because they don’t give us any S**T!” Translation: they can be pushed harder and longer than native-born workers and not get any push-back. In a meat processing plant, that might mean a crew that hadn’t met the daily quota by quitting time would be pushed to work until they did meet the quota without any more pay.
Further damning evidence can be found in the excellent investigative reporting of authors Christopher Leonard in his book The Meat Racket and Eric Schlosser in his book Fast Food Nation. These two detail how the monopsony in meat processing prefers immigrant workers. Add to those reports the excellent investigative series done by the New York Times in which they discover the use of immigrant child labor in meat processing plants. Worst of all, these children are used on the midnight shift cleaning the sharp-bladed bone and flesh-cutting machinery.
A New York Times journalist invokes an economic theory. “The chief logical mistake [opponents of immigrant workers] make is something called the Lump of Labor Fallacy: the erroneous notion that there is only so much work to be done and that no one can get a job without taking one from someone else.” Ironically, the lump of labor (LoL?!) fallacy is a fact. The “lump of labor” is a disparaging way of describing the corps of men and women that constitute the American labor force. At any point in time, it is finite. Two Bureau of Labor Statistics measure this: the employment to population ratio, E-PR — the percentage of the population that is currently working, and the labor force participation rate, LFPR — the ratio of the adult population that is either working or actively looking for work vs. the entire population of the same age. At any point in time, there is only so much work to be done, and that limits the size of these two measures. Going forward, the population increases, so more work must be done, which requires hiring more workers. However, when an immigrant worker is chosen, the job is taken away from that of a native worker.
What confuses the people making this “lump” theory is that they see that immigrants increase the size of the population, the number of consumers in our economy, and the labor force, growing our economy, so they look no further. That’s raw numbers, not information. Putting it in context, such as the LFPR, tells a different story. Population growth indeed causes labor force growth. More people = more consumers = more demand, which prompts producers to increase the output of goods and services. One way to increase production is to hire more workers. The problem, however, is that job growth is not keeping pace with population growth.
Size of the labor force vs. size of population
Looking closely at the graph, however, we see a widening gap as we move into the future. This is easily explained by the declining E-PR and LFPR. Even with the addition of immigrants to our population being the prime force for population growth, that has not been sufficient to lift the percentage of employed adults. That percentage, even with immigrant population growth, is declining.
Labor Force Participation Rate and Employment to Population Ratio, 1990-2023
It is essential to know that the trend for both has declined since 2000. The dips at the start of the great recession and the pandemic and are followed by slight recoveries, but each time, the recovery never reaches the point before the dip. This contraction is like a game of musical chairs. The economy hums along, and workers move about, but chairs (job opportunities) are slowly removed. So, the labor force is not only finite, it is also shrinking. A job given to an immigrant is a job not taken by a native. Remember the evidence of the recent four-year trend: From January ‘20 until February ‘24, in raw numbers, the economy added millions more foreign-born workers and lost some native-born workers. Corporate America—the owners, capitalists, and executives — all want and prefer foreign-born workers.
Pro-immigration individuals will argue that we need immigrants for population growth. When phrased as that, this is true. A 2023 Census Bureau report states that reduced fertility and an aging population is resulting in a natural decrease in native-born populations. As of 2024, with a zero-immigration scenario, the United States population would decline. Right now, immigration has become the largest contributor to population growth.
That population growth is bound up with economic growth — needs to be questioned. Growth is increasingly associated with environmental destruction and rising inequality. Incredibly, the author invoking the lump-of-labor above made this claim: “Environmentally, immigration tends to be less damaging than other forms of growth because it doesn’t add to the number of people on earth and often shifts people to more environmentally friendly jurisdictions.[italics mine]” Americans have the highest carbon footprint of all the globe’s citizens; when immigrants become American consumers, they are more environmentally damaging than they would have been in any other country, including their home country.
Unquestioned in this discussion is whether or not population growth is necessary for our country. Many developed nations are currently experiencing population downsizing. The most prominent example is Japan, where the population has been aging and declining since 2008. Yet, Japan’s people have the highest life expectancy in the world and are the third largest economy in GDP. Small countries with small populations, such as the Netherlands and Switzerland, are in the world's top 20 wealthiest economies. A smaller population should not hurt our economy. Indeed, more people in a country and the world put increasing strain on the Earth’s resources. Fewer people lessen environmental damage. Furthermore, one of the primary reasons for the declining birthrate is the freedom that women all over the world have in their choice to have children and in their opportunities to enter the workplace. That is a good development. Our country needs to have a reasoned conversation about whether or not it is essential to grow our population or accept downsizing.
Historically, we have connected economic growth to higher standards of living. Economist Herman Daly says it well, “We need to make a distinction between development and growth. When something grows … it gets bigger. When something develops, it gets better in a qualitative sense. It doesn’t have to get bigger.” The question of how a country continues to raise its standard of living without growing its GDP should be viewed as quality over quantity. It’s false to assume that growth in the standard of living increases if growth in GDP goes up. Population growth should not be conflated with the need for labor.
The United States is grappling with severe physician shortages. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, 1 in 5 U.S. physicians was born and educated abroad. This shortage was caused by the U. S. government. The residency system is the primary bottleneck for training U.S. physicians, limiting their supply. Starting in 1980, medical schools restricted class sizes after some medical groups asserted that America had an oversupply of physicians. From 1980 to 2005, the U.S. added 60 million people, but the number of medical school matriculants flat-lined. Robert Orr, a healthcare policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, says, “This might be the key bottleneck. The medical schools say they can’t easily expand because there aren’t enough residency slots for their graduates to fill. But there aren’t enough residency slots because Washington has purposefully limited federal residency financing.”
In a way, there is a “need” for foreign-born physicians. Cross-pollinating techniques from other countries benefit the practice of medicine. However, the “need” is manufactured and could be corrected with an appropriate federal policy change.
The worst part about this issue is that the parties to the debate have turned it into a binary question: they do or they don’t, yes or no, black or white, true or false. Like all real-life issues, this one is also very complicated, with multiple factors and dimensions. Instead of a binary, it’s more like a spectrum, continuum, grayscale, or standard distribution curve. Take, for example, the idea that “we need immigrants to do jobs Americans won’t do.” Phrasing it that way, it is true. But, by confidently subscribing 100% to that idea, we wholly and conveniently avoid a confrontation with employers over abuses and exploitation of immigrant workers and the economic inequality that many native-born workers suffer. The idea that “immigrants do not take jobs away from native-born workers” is an absolute lie. Of course they do. The question then becomes, how many jobs? Is it necessary? What’s the impact on native workers? Or, once again, does it enable greedy employers to make immoral profits?
This entire topic, however, will become moot in the next two decades. Unlike anything seen before, technology will replace human workers in catastrophic numbers. Take agriculture: right now, there are robotic strawberry-picking machines. They have not yet been adopted on a large scale because we have cheap, exploitable immigrant workers as farm workers. Urban farming, vertical farming, and container farms will completely change the face of agriculture by moving the production site from rural, remote counties into urban areas with a surplus pool of laborers. This technology promises not only to reduce the number of laborers but also to have a tremendously positive effect on greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental damage.
But the most significant technological revolution in the history of Homo sapiens is being invented and developed by workers around the world, as you read this. Very shortly, engineers, scientists, and inventors will marry artificial intelligence with robotics. They will be putting a neural network that exceeds the intelligence of human beings into a package that looks like, moves like, and acts like a human being. Furthermore, this development will not create new jobs because this technology, for the first time in history, is able to reproduce itself, program and operate itself, and fix itself. These machines are not intended to enhance the productivity of human workers; these machines become the workers. Our economy, country, and civilization are not ready for that. These machines are more intelligent than humans, stronger than humans, work tirelessly, and work without complaint. And, as one employer famously said during the pandemic, “They don’t get Covid.” Where will immigrants be employed then?
The true nature of how immigrant workers fit in the economy alongside native-born workers is not whether we need them but how many our economy can accept without displacing native-born workers. Where is there a legitimate need that native-born workers cannot fulfill and that immigrant workers can expeditiously fill? Where and when are our immigrant workers serving the greed of business people and perpetuating income inequality for natives? When framed as this binary, “foreign-born workers do not replace native-born workers,” that is an outright lie that presents an obstacle to the best resolution of immigrant policy and the needs of American workers. Another binary is that the American economy needs immigrant workers. It’s not a “need” but, instead, a “want.” The argument that “immigrants to work that Americans don’t want to do” is an entirely unacceptable argument. It’s an excuse for an overwhelming majority of occupations and individual labor circumstances that are immoral, unjust, or illegal.
Ironically, it is the mainstream argument that calls the truth about immigrant labor a myth that is the mistake. We have to separate the arguments for immigration in general from the smaller offshoot of the “need for labor” argument because they have different purposes and roles to play in our society. We need to stop talking in binaries and express and consider the many dimensions of the issue. I argue not for more legislation but, for better enforcement of existing laws and regulations to shut down employers’ practices of exploiting immigrants.
Sources
1. “Immigration Myths and Facts,” U. S. Chamber of Commerce, April 14, 2016
3. Between January 2020 and February 2024, the U. S. economy lost 615k native-born workers. During the same time, 3.936 million foreign-born workers were added. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment Level - Native Born [LNU02073413], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU02073413, March 25, 2024.
4. U. S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, “H-1B Specialty Occupations, DOD Cooperative Research and Development Project Workers, and Fashion Models,” https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/h-1b-specialty-occupations, accessed 8.27.22.
5. Bloomberg Businessweek, “The Secret Way Silicon Valley Uses the H-1B Program”, By Joshua Brustein, June 6, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-06/silicon-valley-s-h-1b-secret, accessed 5.18.20
6. “Fired Americans Say Indian Firm Gave Their Jobs to H-1B Visa Holders,” Newley Purnell, 3.29.24, https://www.wsj.com/business/fired-americans-say-indian-firm-gave-their-jobs-to-h-1b-visa-holders-6da7cf26?mod=djem10point
7. Smith, Hedrick, “Who Stole the American Dream?”, p. 290
9. “A majority of Americans say immigrants mostly fill jobs U.S. citizens do not want,” Jens Manuel Krogstad, Mark Hugo Lopez and Jeffrey S. Passel, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/06/10/a-majority-of-americans-say-immigrants-mostly-fill-jobs-u-s-citizens-do-not-want/
11. “They’re Paid Billions to Root Out Child Labor in the U.S. Why Do They Fail?” By Hannah Dreier, Dec. 28, 2023, NYT, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/28/us/migrant-child-labor-audits.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20231228&instance_id=111159&nl=the-morning®i_id=59003976&segment_id=153708&te=1&user_id=3e76b8da36793dadb6c2c1eae268b6bf
12. “Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant,” Adam Davidson, March 24, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/magazine/debunking-the-myth-of-the-job-stealing-immigrant.html , visited 3.14.24
13. U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Population [POPTHM], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/POPTHM, March 22, 2024. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Civilian Labor Force Level [CLF16OV], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CLF16OV, March 22, 2024.
14. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment-Population Ratio [EMRATIO], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EMRATIO, March 21, 2024. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Labor Force Participation Rate [CIVPART], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART, March 18, 2024.
18. Information on the physician shortage is drawn from: “Unmatched: Repairing the U.S. Medical Residency Pipeline,” Robert Orr, September 20, 2021, https://www.niskanencenter.org/unmatched-repairing-the-u-s-medical-residency-pipeline/ , accessed 2.16.22; “Why America Has So Few Doctors,” Derek Thompson, February 14, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/why-does-the-us-make-it-so-hard-to-be-a-doctor/622065/?utm_source=pocket-newtab , accessed 2.16.22.