> The UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that over 80
>million people today live outside their countries of origin. This is a
>permanent, global phenomenon, and the U.S. is home to only a small
>percentage of those migrating people.
Indeed. So much of migration and refugee movement if from one low income to another low income country: Bangladesh to India, Haiti to the DR, Guatemala to Mexico, Rwanda to Congo.
> Immigration enforcement actions haven't improved the lives and job
>prospects for other workers either, and in fact have undermined wages and
>working conditions. The more fearful undocumented workers have become of
>losing their jobs as a result of INS actions, the more employers have been
>able to impose lower wages and worse conditions.
As Leo Chavez of UC Irvine argues, the purpose of CA Prop 187 may have been to encourage only "illegal" single males to migrate (as it was determined that women and children made greater use of the public servics access to which was to be denied) in order to drive the wage down to the level necessary only to reproduce one worker in the US and the family at a lower level in Mexico, instead of the whole family in the US.
> While certain industries hire immigrant workers in an effort to
>keep wages down, it is an illusion to imagine that simply by replacing
>those immigrant workers with native-born ones, that those same employers
>will voluntarily raise salaries.
One could however say that restriction of worker supply is a necessary but not sufficient condition for wage increases. One could then counter that no matter how restricted the supply of labor, capital will nonetheless create an industrial reserve army of labor out of any given population base of workers--so that fighting the problem at the level of supply restriction is always bound to fail.
Rakesh