Ebook Undocumented Workers In The Labor Market: An Analysis Of The Earnings Of Legal And Illegal Immigrants In The U.S.
Illegal immigration has become a topic of worldwide controversy in recent years. Whether it is concerned with the migration of Bangladeshis to India, Albanians to Greece, North Africans to Italy, or Mexicans to the United States, host country governments are rushing to define policies intended to curtail illegal immigration.
In the United States, a prolonged debate over the issue has led to two major immigration policy initiatives: the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), and the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. Despite this legislation, the debate on the role of undocumented workers in the American labor market rages on.
One of the key issues surrounding undocumented workers is the extent to which they are exploited, or discriminated against, in host country labor markets by being paid wages that are substantially below those paid to legal workers with identical characteristics. The view that the exploitation of illegal immigrants is rampant in U.S. labor markets has been the landmark of many popular accounts that have surfaced in the press, although it also appears in some academic studies. For instance, the following August 1995 case involving Thai and Hispanic undocumented garment workers received broad attention in the American press: "The workers were forced to toil in a compound ringed with barbed wire for less than $1 an hour [when the minimum wage was $4.25].
The workers' plight was discovered...when sweatshops were raided in El Monte, California" [Reuters (1996)]. The sweatshop owners were later forced to pay their employees the legal minimum retroactively. Similarly, in a detailed 1995 exposÈ of sweatshops in New York City, the New York Times concluded that "Sweatshops...are flourishing...nearly 2,000 sweatshops operate openly throughout New York City...They generally employ 20 to 50 workers, many of them illegal immigrants, willing to suffer long hours, low pay and miserable working conditions just to have a job" [Finder (1995), p. B4].
Even in working environments other than sweatshops, illegal immigrants have been documented to receive lower pay compared to similar legal workers. In an account of the lives of illegal immigrant workers in California, New York Times contributor Richard Rayner joined a Mexican illegal immigrant, Ruben, in his morning trip to work in a construction site, reproducing some of the worker's comments along the way. One of these comments is on the issue of wages: "...the truck heads out again, up into Topanga Canyon. "There's a lot of construction up there," says Ruben. "Many rich people. But they use legal workers. Those guys will get $20 an hour. I'm looking to get $7, $8 an hour." Sometimes, however, he has to take $4" [Rayner (1996), p. 31].
On the surface, existing surveys of illegal immigrants in the United States appear to support these observations, finding that many undocumented workers receive wages that are generally lower than those prevailing in the labor market. For instance, one of the earliest, and best-known, surveys of illegal immigrants consists of a 1975 sample of 793 illegal immigrants apprehended by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), analyzed by David North and Marion Houstoun. The average hourly wage received by the illegal workers was 37 percent lower than the average wage received by all workers in the same industry [North and Houstoun (1976), p. S-11]. An identical wage gap between legal and illegal immigrants is obtained by Douglas Massey, in his own 1987 survey of Mexican immigrants.
Despite the broad evidence showing that many undocumented workers receive lower wages than other workers in the U.S. economy, many of the leading economists in this field do not share the believe that illegal immigrants are exploited. As Barry Chiswick clearly notes: "There is no denying that illegal aliens are paid low wages relative to the average U.S. worker. But the low wages of illegal aliens do not appear to be the result of employer exploitation. Rather, they appear to be the result of low skill levels. Most illegal aliens have low levels of schooling, limited fluency in English, and are relative newcomers in the U.S. labor market" [Chiswick (1988), p. 143]. A similar opinion is voiced by George Borjas: "...the empirical evidence, limited as it is, provides little support to the proposition that American employers take advantage of illegal aliens...Illegal aliens in the United States have lower wages than legal immigrants not because they are illegal, but because they are less skilled. In other words, if one compares two persons who are demographically similar (in terms of education, age, English proficiency, years on the job, and so on), legal status has no direct impact on the wage rate" [Borjas (1990), p. 72].
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