Employers Depress Wages, Not Immigrant Workers!

I would like to give a hat-tip to the blog Amerikanbeat for getting me started on this rant. So also check out what he has to say.

Nothing annoys me more from the anti-"illegal"-immigrant worker rhetoric than the complaint that "illegal immigrants depress our wages". To paraphrase a caller I recently heard on a talk radio show, her voice dripping with contempt: "These illegal alien Mexicans come in here and will work for anything."

This is patentely absurd. Of course, being that human labor is a commodity to be bought and sold on the market under capitalism, the greater numbers of workers, and the more desperate they are for a wage, the stronger the downward pressure on wages. But the undocumented worker does not get up early in the morning and say to him or herself "I am just an illegal alien, therefore I will accept $5.00 per hour even though I probably could get $8.00 per hour."

Of course immigrant workers are perfectly willing to work for as high a wage as he/she can secure. I saw it for myself recently in a scene in the documentary Farmingville POV, where yes, immigrant workers turn down an offer for $7.00 and demand at least $10.00. (This is actually a pretty decent documentary, also available on Netflix).

It is of course the capitalist employers who depress wages whenever they are able to, given the conditions of the labor market, to maximize their profits. It is the illegal status of the immigrant worker that creates an even more unequal balance of power between employer and worker, undermining the latter's bargaining power. But lets be clear, it is the employer, not the worker who tries to pay as low a wage as possible given the circumstances. And it is the conditions of U.S. capitalism with its dehumanizing divisions of workers into legal vs. illegal that gives the bosses more power to depress wages.

So why on earth would you blame the relatively less powerful so-called "illegal immigrant" for depressing wages? It is simply absurd to blame them for not having all the social and political resources that comes with legal status to demand a higher wage. This kind of thinking is a testament to how dehumanizing patriotic- nationalist and bourgeois ideology is in destroying basic feelings of empathy and solidarity between people based on legal status, race and ethnicity. Makes me angry and sick!