How Mass Migration Creates Labor Shortages
With illegal immigrants rioting in Los Angeles we can see the social costs of illegal immigration.
But what about the economic costs.
Across the West the open border left pushes the narrative that we need immigrants to fill labor shortages.
This is false. Obviously false once you work through it.
Legal vs Illegal Immigrants
For starters, there's a world of difference between legal immigrants. Who may vote socialist but at least commit very little crime, start businesses, and tend to move up the economic ladder.
Versus illegal immigrants, who by definition wouldn't have passed our already generous immigration standards.
Illegals commit crime more than natives. More than half go on welfare. And when they do work they undercut native blue-collar and low-skill workers.
Meaning they effectively give us two welfare cases -- their own plus the native born worker who can't get a job.
Indeed, there's reports of low-skill Americans being denied jobs because they don't speak Spanish. As in, they can't communicate with the migrants.
This wouldn’t be tolerated in any country — including the origin countries of migrants.
The Migrant “Labor Shortage” Fallacy
But it goes deeper. Because the claim that immigrants solve a labor shortage is false even for legal immigrants.
To see why, imagine we annex Canada -- yes, Donald Trump's dreams come true.
Canada has about 20 million workers. So do we immediately have 20 million extra workers laying around?
Of course not, those 20 million are already doing stuff for other Canadians. They work at McDonald's -- or Tim Horton's. They're dental hygienists, truck drivers, accountants working for other Canadians.
In other words, once we annex Canada we’ll find the 20 million new workers are fully occupied serving the other 20 million.
There are no extra workers.
And this is true whether we annex the whole country or just annex the people -- also known as immigration.
How Migration Causes Labor Shorages
It's even worse with illegals and low-skill migrants.
Because we already have plenty of low-skill workers — there is no shortage, in fact we have government make-work programs for low-skill Americans.
Yet low-skill migrants actually *import* an identical shortage of high-skilled jobs.
To see why, if you import a million low-skill migrants, you now have too many farm laborers or janitors — the wages drop.
But you've got a precisely identical new shortage in the high-skill workers who serve the farm workers and janitors -- doctors, dentists, teachers.
Remember those 20 million Canadians, but in this case you only got the farm workers and janitors. Not the doctors.
So Americans cannot get a doctor's appointment. Or find a speech pathologist for their child. A veterinarian costs an arm and a leg.
But by gum gardeners are cheap.
Of course, this is why big business likes open borders: They get dirt-cheap unskilled workers. The rest of us have to deal with the new skilled labor shortages.
Meanwhile, of course, blue-collar Americans -- and even blue-collar legal immigrants -- either can't find a job or face minimum wage for back-breaking work.
Incidentally, this is also why high-skilled migrants are an economic benefit: Engineers and doctors get cheap and plentiful, then drive up demand for blue-collars when they go to the grocery store or get a haircut.
In other words, high-skilled migration helps the working class.
Low-skill migration guts the working class.
And across the board migration does nothing for labor shortages — it’s the 20 million Canadians.
What’s Next
The labor shortage fallacy has been one of open borders’ most successful arguments.
But outside the very highest skilled migrants it is false -- we'd be better off with almost zero immigration.
Instead focusing on Americans. Improving education by replacing government schools. Ending welfare for the able-bodied so they can get on the first rung of the ladder. Making it easier for Americans to create jobs in the first place.
Final point, this isn’t just true for America, it’s true for any rich country, from Canada to France to Japan. High quality migrants are helpful — at least economically. But mass migration is pure cost.
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I would take one issue with your essay. Unbalanced immigration is bad, which is what we’ve had for years now.
Our immigration strategy should be multi-faceted. Always on the lookout for skilled workers and always conscious of a need for general labor. Skilled workers is an easy one, but for general labor you need only track average hourly earnings. Right now it has been suppressed by unrelenting low skill immigration. So for the time being all low skilled immigration should stop. Once wages have risen to an appropriate level, a managed flow of immigration could once again be considered. Because at a certain point, labor scarcity will become a thing, and to grow the economy, you will need more general labor.
You should check out https://substack.com/@mattgoodwin . In the past, he's produced some really good data on the story of low or no skilled migration category in the UK. The figure from mass migration is 60% for low or no skilled. Only 4% of all migration to the UK qualifies as net contributor!