million extra people in the U.S. Since they dont pay taxes, for them, $5.60/hr
is the same as your $7/hr. To compete with domestic labor, these illegal immigrants
actually bid wages down to this level (or lower, if they are willing to
live in worse conditions). Responding to this, landscaping companies are now
paying $5.60/hr instead of $7.
So hundreds of thousands of domestic laborers have now been driven out of
landscaping work, since they’ve all been underbid. And suddenly, they are all
competing for the jobs at Wal-mart. What does Wal-mart then do? Of course,
it gleefully bids wages down as low as they’ll go, which, lets assume, is now
$6/hr. Wal-mart lowers prices. But there are now a lot of pissed off domestic
laborers, and everyone is pissed off at Wal-mart, and most people are also pissed
off at the illegal immigrants.
All we did was add in illegal immigration, and now you are only able to earn
$6/hr at the same Wal-mart job. Note that you aren’t working on a landscaping
crew and you haven’t lost the job, yet you’ve still had to take a pay cut due
to the indirect, but massive influence of adding over seven million sub-base
laborers.
This effect can be extended upward: IT desktop support may fall from
$12/hr to $11/hr, and so forth, because now lots of Wal-mart’s best former
employees are competing for relatively “cushy” IT jobs. Thus, one can see how
the introduction of illegal aliens has effects that ripple throughout the labor
market, though they are felt most markedly near “the bottom.”
So, without the illegal immigrant labor force, wages would go up for the
domestic unemployed who took up the previously-black market jobs. Wages
would even go up for those who stuck with their current jobs, rather than
switching into vacated roles. Wages would have to go up—because now nearly
everyone working would be paying into the same tax system; thus they would
have to be paid more.
What this all shows is that illegal immigrants have a...