Immigration

Some excerpts from an article in the Monitor regarding a local crackdown on the hiring of immigrants in Idaho...

"They say these are jobs that no one else will take," says Tim Smallwood, an Idaho fruit and vegetable inspector, as he takes a lunch break in Caldwell. But if employers were denied that pool of cheap labor, overall wages would go up he says.

What Tim and most Americans don't seem to realize is the fact that the rest of the world will be most willing to supply us with even more of the fruit and vegetables we demand as soon as those wages rise. To be competitive; the market place will shift to South and Central America. We are in a no-win situation here. The same thing happened in Hawaii on a smaller scale as the pineapple industry moved to the Phillipines when wages rose to a non-competitive level.

Lori Morrison, who manages a night shift at Jack-in-the-Box to help support her family, shares the worry about wages. And she adds another concern: the social-service burden on government. "Taxes have gone up," she says. "They're killing us."

Lori needs to do some homework. Americans enjoy some of the lowest tax rates per capita when compared to the rest of the civilized nations...but we do enjoy complaining about them! What's killing her are the low wages at Jack-in-the-Box, not the taxes. And education? Why can't Lori get a better job?

It's far easier to complain than it is to do something positive about the problem.

And a note that is often ignored...for our economy to remain in neutral, not gain and not lose, we need to create 50,000 new jobs every quarter. Not replace jobs...create new. So if we got rid of the immigrant workers and replaced them with American workers, we would still need to create those 50,000 jobs.

Japan, because of its anti-immigrant stance, faces that problem right now. And their economy is forecast to grow weaker each year...