Illegals: Will They Be Taking Jobs Away From U.S. Citizens?
The short- and long-term economics of the illegal to legal plan.
May 18, 2007 — -- With the announcement from Washington on Thursday of a possible compromise bill that would allow millions of illegal immigrants in the United States to become legal and start the process to become citizens, ABC News spoke with several economists about the potential economic impact of this plan.
For the most part, the consensus was that "most of the impact is already there" as Giovanni Peri, a economics professor at the University of California in Davis, described it.
The perception that millions of undocumented immigrants working as busboys, maids and day laborers at construction sites earn substandard wages is largely inaccurate.
In the United States "labor markets are competitive enough that it's difficult to find evidence that illegal immigrants have been getting paid less than minimum wage," Pia Orrenius, a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas who studies labor and immigration, told ABC News.
David Card, a labor economics professor at the University of California in Berkeley, agreed. Immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries are not crossing the border for minimum wage jobs, but search for high wages -- $10 an hour for example -- working in construction or in the agricultural industry.
"Relatively few employers are paying below the minimum wage," he said. "For most, there is some 'don't ask don't tell.' They have some sort of document [from the immigrant] and they are hiring on the presumption the document is valid."
And while some believe these undocumented workers are taking away jobs from legal citizens, economists disagree. They say the demand for low wages workers is strong in this country and that the debate among economists focuses on whether or not these illegal workers depress the wages for these sorts of jobs.
"Being legal or illegal doesn't make a big difference in wages," concluded Peri. He said there have been a few studies examining the issue and that "the most important determinate of wages are skills, occupation, time in the job, experience in the country, level of English."
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