By JIM GILCHRIST & JEROME CORSI, PH.D.

There are jobs that just simply aren’t getting done because Americans won’t do them.

—President George W. Bush, Cleveland, Ohio, March 20, 2006

The “Trojan Horse Invasion” has been incremental, a few million illegal immigrants each year. Until recently, we had not seen an all-out invasion by 4 to 5 million illegal immigrants per year. We are reminded of a famous analogy: If you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will leap out. If you place a frog in cool water and slowly turn up the heat, it will allow itself to slowly cook to death. Americans have been aware of the invasion; we have seen our communities change not all at once, but over the span of years since the 1990s. Like the proverbial frog, however, we have stayed in the water as it gradually heats to a boil. Today, Hispanic communities exist in cities all across the nation.

Moreover, Americans see millions of illegal immigrants marching defiantly in the streets, waving Mexican flags and marching under predominantly Mexican banners and slogans. The demonstrations beginning in March and April 2006 were a wake-up call for many middle-class Americans. When foreign nationals assemble on U.S. soil and march in the streets under a foreign flag, that demonstration appears to many middle-class Americans to be an open defiance of the rule of U.S. law, virtually a declaration of dominion over the United States. The message that many middle-class Americans hear is that these foreigners are not in the United States to assimilate, they are here to take over. The argument advanced by President Bush has been that the illegal immigrants are here because they will do “jobs that Americans won’t do.” We resolved to examine that argument closely.

Business Exploits the “Guest Worker” Slave Trade

The twenty-first century slave trade involves an organized effort to bring into the United States an underclass of uneducated, impoverished illegal immigrants who will work for below market wages for companies that plan to commit employment tax fraud and violations of labor and immigration laws. No slave trader may actually go to Mexico or other Hispanic countries to capture workers and force them in chains to come to America to work in sub-standard conditions. Yet, we have termed this “under-market” in illegal alien workers the “twenty-first century slave trade” because the practice of brokering workers into these jobs involves a determination to exploit the labor of the underclass. Greed, not concern for human rights, drives employers to go below minimum wage or union pay. Employers who hire illegal immigrants typically plan to commit payroll tax fraud and to provide no benefits. “Servitude” sets in when the workers come to live in the United States and find no alternative but to accept these under-market jobs. Often living in extended family units, the economic opportunity here may still be better than in their home countries. Still, by U.S. standards, the illegal immigrant laborer is being exploited; otherwise their employment market probably would not exist in the first place.

Over time, these twenty-first century slaves exploited by unscrupulous employers will be replaced by the next wave of economic refugees who will work for even less, and who will, in turn, be replaced by the next wave who will work for even less again. The Left, which has argued for decades to increase minimum wages and to preserve union employment benefits, should be concerned that allowing this illegal alien under-market to thrive in the U.S. will undercut their efforts to preserve pay and employment conditions in low wage, low skill jobs.

Once employers are forced to pay all workers, even illegal immigrants, minimum or union wages, plus benefits, in addition to paying all payroll taxes that are due, the economic logic driving this under-market illegal alien hiring will simply go away. This is a downward spiral that will undermine all meaningful employment at the lower paying end of the job spectrum.

Businesses owners who exploit these “undocumented guest workers” do not foresee that, within 10 to 20 years, their businesses could be paying half of their net profits into welfare programs to subsidize a massive dependent underclass. For a business to save $2 an hour, or $4 an hour, maybe 200 dollars a week, is it willing to sell out the United States of America to a foreign invading underclass army? Is giving up the sovereignty of this nation worth a business saving $10,000 in employment costs this year?

“Jobs Americans Won’t Do”

As we have noted, the core argument that President Bush has advanced to justify his guest worker program is that there are jobs Americans won’t do. The problem is that the president’s core assumption is false. The job statistics show that there is no job an American won’t do. Moreover, there is no job classification in which foreign-born workers are the majority. Even in the low-paying, menial job categories, Americans still hold most of the jobs.

Let’s look at the statistics. Those who are generally favorably disposed toward illegal aliens in the workforce argue that illegal aliens tend to find work in the U.S. and that they hold a larger percentage of the less-skilled positions. Dr. Jeffrey Passel, the senior Research Associate of the Pew Hispanic Center quoted earlier, notes that in March of 2005, his statistics show approximately 7.2 million “unauthorized migrants” (illegal aliens) in the civilian U.S. workforce, accounting for about 4.9 percent of the 148 million workers in the United States. Dr. Passel reports that a higher percentage of illegal immigrants tended to take less skilled jobs than did native-born workers. Here are three of the lower-skilled job categories, with the percentage of illegal aliens taking these jobs listed first, and the percentage of native-born Americans in these occupations listed in parenthesis: 31 percent of all illegal immigrants working take service occupation jobs (compared to 16 percent of native-born Americans); 19 percent of illegal aliens are in construction and extractive jobs (compared to 6 percent of native-born Americans); and 15 percent of illegal aliens are in production, installation and repair jobs (compared to 10 percent of native-born Americans). These numbers sound as though illegal aliens were necessary for these jobs to get done.

The statistics, however, are deceptive when read this way. As illegal aliens comprise a relatively small percentage of the U.S. workforce (4.9 percent), that a higher percentage of illegal aliens take construction jobs than do native-born workers does not mean that a majority of construction workers are illegal aliens. Let’s take a simple example to make the point. Let’s say there are five illegal aliens and 95 native-born workers in a group. Illegal aliens make up 5 percent of the total sample of one hundred. If 100 percent of these five illegal aliens work in construction, we have five illegal aliens in construction. If only 10 perc..ent of the native-born workers in this sample work in construction, we have 10 native-born construction workers. Thus, because the population sample is larger—there are many more native-born workers—a smaller percentage of native-born workers still allows the native—born workers to comprise the majority in that category.

Dr. Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies makes this exact point. The highest percentage of immigrants in any job category (including both legal and illegal immigrants) involves “farming, fishing & forestry,” in which 44.7 percent of the workers are immigrants. The next highest proportion is construction; yet even here, only 26.1 percent of the workers are immigrants. Dr. Camarota makes this point directly:

“It’s simply incorrect to say that immigrants only do jobs natives don’t want. If that were so, then there should be occupations comprised almost entirely of immigrants. Just the first five occupational categories of farming/fishing/ forestry, construction, building cleaning/maintenance, and food processing currently employ 22 million adult native-
born Americans.”

Americans do every kind of work imaginable in America today. To say that there is work that Americans won’t do is just not true. Perhaps what the president meant to say is that illegal immigrants will do the work cheaper or at below minimum or union wage levels. Let’s look at the next two sentences of the quotation from the president with which we began this chapter. Perhaps it gives us more insight into what President Bush really means:

“There are jobs that just simply aren’t getting done because Americans won’t do them. And yet, if you’re making 50 cents an hour in Mexico, and you can make a lot more in America, and you‘ve got mouths to feed, you’re going to come and try to find the work. It’s a big border, across which people are coming to provide a living for their families.”

If the president means that Mexico is so impoverished that even working wages there do not compare with below market wages here, he is probably right. Americans will not work at below market rates, and why should they?

We have fought for minimum wage laws and for union wages in this country since the 1930s. Are we supposed to abandon all those laws now, just because Mexican illegal immigrants coming into the United States consider any job paying more than 50 cents an hour to be a good job? If this is what the president really means, he is supporting our argument that the illegal alien invasion really constitutes a Twenty-first century slave trade. n

Published by persmission of World Ahead Publishing, available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders as of July 25, 2006, www.worldaheadpublishing.com