Letter to the Editor of the Week

Amy Traub

Letter to the Editor of the Week

One of our aims at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy is to "challenge the tired orthodoxies of both the right and the left." Nowhere is that more apparent than in our focus on immigration policy: over the past year we've found ourselves criticizing both the guest-worker program promoted by Senator Ted Kennedy and the immigration plan proposed by President Bush. We've diverged from allies like the union UNITE-HERE on how to achieve the best immigration policy to better the lives of immigrant workers and U.S. citizens alike. And with this week's featured Letter to the Editor, we're in agreement with the chairman of the New Hampshire College Republicans. His letter appears today in Newsday.

'Guest workers' won't solve problem
I am tired of hearing that because Americans will not take certain jobs, we need to allow currently illegal immigrants to do them in a guest-worker program. I am a 21-year-old college student who would gladly take a job washing dishes or mowing lawns for a summer's worth of work. Plenty of other college and high school students would do the same.

The only reason Americans cannot get these jobs is because employers are able to pay someone who is in this country illegally well below the minimum wage. Why would you pay a 16-year-old student $5.15 an hour when you can have someone else do the same day's work for $2 and a lunch? There is no job beneath an American. The day we begin to believe that will be a sad day for this country.

Thomas DeRosa
Lindenhurst
Editor's note: The writer is chairman of the New Hampshire College Republicans.

Thomas DeRosa, we salute you! You're right that you will never get a job mowing lawns for minimum wage as long as employers can easily find someone to do the work for less. And the argument that there are some jobs U.S. citizens simply won't do -- given adequate wages and working conditions -- is fundamentally flawed.

We need to take the next step, however, and recognize that undocumented immigrants would also prefer to be working for better wages. They're toiling for substandard pay only because they lack the ability to demand a fair deal in the workplace. And as long as undocumented workers are vulnerable to that kind of exploitation, Thomas can't get a job washing dishes unless he too is willing to accept the degraded (and illegal) going rate. Until we make sure everyone participating in our labor market has full workplace rights, U.S. workers -- not just college kids looking for a summer job but full-time workers trying to support a family -- risk being undermined. That argument is at the crux of DMI's immigration analysis. Thanks to Thomas DeRosa for illustrating it so clearly.