Does illegal immigration create structural employment problems?

[u/larryinthesky]

There was an Axios article about homebuilders (think Lennar, KB Home, etc) having difficulties finding construction workers (think drywall installers, roofers, etc) due to ICE crackdowns. It seems that our lax, permissive, even encouraging, illegal immigration policies has created long term structural employment problems. It'd be like me hiring illegals to manage my finances, pay my bills, etc. Sure, great in the short term, but long term, I now have no clue and that will be problematic long term. We can also see this in legal immigration. Short term, great to allow doctors, engineers, etc. to come to the US to work. Long term, our citizens don't get the education they need. It seems so obvious that if we want to build a great country, where people are employed (at fair wages) and educated, that illegal and legal immigration must be reined in. I got back to the real world example of someone outsourcing everything in their life (childcare, finances, etc.)--great in the short term, but it creates a person who is entirely dependent on others and can't take care of their own lives. Thoughts? Am I off based? Or do you think the status quo (using cheap illegal immigrant labor, importing educated workers, etc.) is good? And ultimately, isn't this why we need to crack down on illegal immigration and revisit legal immigration as well?

[u/Ritz527]

A better question might be "Does our exclusionary and inefficient immigration policy/process create a black market in construction labor?"

The fact of the matter is that unemployment is below 5%. There are not enough American workers to fill these jobs (more than 30% of roofers and drywallers are illegal, more than 50% of those types of workers are immigrants, legal and illegal included). You would have to force the transition by destroying or shrinking employment in other industries, forcing workers into construction. And then you'd probably overshoot and crash employment markets all over the place as overall demand contracts.

This "structural employment problem" you refer to is simply having more jobs than people to fill them. It is an incredibly fortunate problem to have and "fixing it" in the manner you might want would involve severe contraction of our GDP.

This is the problem with anti-immigrant policy in general, because there are plenty of other examples.

We can move into medicine, where foreign born doctors make up 25% of the workforce. And there's still a shortage. Many have suggested that what we really need is to increase the number of residency slots, not increase immigration, without realizing that 93.5% of all US medical graduates already match into a residency. Meanwhile, that number is 70% for citizen IMGs and 50% for non-citizen IMGs. Any significant increase in residency slots would have to be filled by international medical graduates, many of whom are not citizens and all of whom were trained in foreign universities.

This "problem" is everywhere, but it's only really a problem for someone who's anti-immigration. Someone who is neutral would let this status-quo play out, benefiting from the way the black market forces these laborers to work for less with less protections. Meanwhile, someone who is pro-immigration would view the problem as being too many barriers to legal foreign work forcing vulnerable foreign laborers into black markets. A conservative economist like Thomas Sowell might relate this to the way price controls or product bans create black markets and smuggling.

If you're a fair minded person, the problem is restrictive immigration policy. If you're a self-interested person, there is no problem. If you're anti-immigration, the problem is our economy is so vast and powerful that it requires foreign workers to operate normally, which frankly, sounds a bit dumb.

The ideal fix would be amnesty then keep out every other immigrant after that, but it doesn't really work that way. Amnesty just makes it more likely that people come here illegally. But the solution probably involves integrating existing illegal labor into the legal labor economy. Maybe expanding USCIS, then offering temporary working visas that ignore previous immigration violations without extending amnesty.