Steven Camarota - Director of Research, Center for Immigration Studies Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Say, twenty part our time here on Houston's Morning News. Well,
that's from the good old days when you were stopped
at the border and they were making decisions about letting
you in. That's when the border wasn't wide open. But
we're going to go back closer to those days than
the days we're living in right now. Stephen Comorado joins
this director of Research Center for Immigration Studies, and Steve
and I've been asking just about everybody who has a

(00:23):
foot in this story about immigration, about what the US
construction industry is saying about how they can't attract enough
Americans to build these jobs, and the construction industry is
going to have a lot of problems if we have
mass deportations. You agree or disagree, No, I.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Think that it's an over exaggeration. We know that. Look,
if you started enforcing law, it would be a gradual
process anyway, It's not like everyone would leave. And the
fact is we do have an enormous number of people
still on the economic sidelines, especially men. So if we
could pay better and treat workers better, we could all
more people back into the labor force. So I don't

(01:04):
think that the steady or consistent enforcement of our immigration laws,
and a steady fall in the number of illegal immigrants
would have a very large impact on our economy. Just
as an aside, immigration advocates have always argued immigration does
not reduce wages. So if that's true, then not to

(01:26):
worry at all, because if the immigrants left, it would
have no impact on wages or prices. Because one concern is,
you know, spark inflation, but that assumes that immigration has
a very substantial impact on wages. I do think it
does have an impact on wages, and wages will ride,
will rise. But we're talking about the bottom end of
the US labor marked primarily workers who say have no

(01:49):
education beyond high school, because that's where illegal immigrants are concentrated,
not exclusively, but primarily. And so if the poorest, least
educated American workers on a substantial rays, I think that
would be good public policy.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
I agree they'd be better off, that's for certain. So
another story too, I don't know if you saw this story.
A pork producer in Iowa evidently has been busted by
the Labor Department for employing eleven year old children to
work overnight shifts at their pork producing plant. I know
that we have a real issue in this country and
attracting workers to those types of jobs chicken processing, food

(02:27):
processing plants, those types of things. You see that as
a potential problem going forward.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Well, are most of the workers as is true in
construction in America. That may not be true in a local,
particular local city, but most of the workers who do
construction labor or work in meat and poultry processing are
US born. And then of the foreign born workers there,
who might make up forty percent, about half are legal.
So illegal immigrants only make up about twenty percent of

(02:56):
people very very roughly in an industry like that, So if.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
They left now, they would probably have paid more.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
Generally speaking, and this is an important point because we
see this in a lot of industries. Generally speaking, it's
thought that real wages adjusted for inflation, and meat and
poultry processing are down something like forty percent in the
last four decades. So one of the reasons they have
trouble attracting workers to those kinds of jobs is the
very unpleasant, for one thing, cutting up dead animals. But

(03:26):
the other is they actually pay a lot less than
they used to and then complain that genius, we can't
find any folks. Yeah, it's it's likely we're going to
have to pay more. But the second point is equally important.
Unskilled labor, including in meat and poultry processing, only accounts
for a tiny share of overall costs. So maybe maybe

(03:47):
in that field about nine percent. So when you buy
a piece of meat at the supermarket, about nine percent
of it is what the person who cut it up,
you know, got paid. The rest is you know, transferation, packaging, advertising,
all the stuff that goes into the meat before it
even arrives at the processing facility, you know, the feed

(04:07):
and everything. And so if wages had to rise, say
a third, it's still only a third of nine percent.
So that would mean wages would go up by three percent,
assuming the employer and the companies passed all those costs
onto you, and assuming they didn't invest in any labor
saving devices and techniques. So the impact of raising the

(04:29):
wages at the people at the bottom cannot mathematically be
very large because we don't pay them that much to
begin with.

Speaker 1 (04:36):
Gotcha, Steven, got a run, But thank you so much.
Director of Research at the Center for Immigration Studies, Steven
Colorado