Speech #1100054109

The company clerk stopped her and said valid Social Security numbers never begin with a 9. The clerk kept saying: Maybe you want to put down a 4 or a 6. So the illegal immigrant wrote down a 6. and of course the application was accepted. After the raid. almost 75 percent of the workers were determined to have been illegal immigrants and the company decided it needed to find workers. so they decided to raise wages. An advertisement in the weekly newspaper titled "Increased Wages" at Crider. starting at $7 to $9 an hour. That was more than a dollar an hour above what the company had paid many immigrant workers. It began offering free transportation from nearby towns. free rooms in companyowned dormitories near the plant. and for the first time in years. the company aggressively sought workers from the area Statefunded employment office. which is a key avenue for lowskilled workers to find jobs. Continuing again to describe the Wall Street Journal article. it said: Hundreds of local workers. many of them minorities. accepted the higher wages and were happy to take these jobs. Pretty soon this Georgia company was apparently hiring back some additional illegal immigrant workers who had been previously caught up in the raid. They turned to a "temporary labor provider" who began to provide the company with the same illegal immigrant workers who had been caught in the first raid. So the immigration officials conducted a second raid and the company then finally agreed to stop working with temporary labor. The point of this story is very simple: If you have substantial amounts of illegal immigrant labor coming in. it puts downward pressure on wages. Eliminate that illegal labor from the marketplace. and what happens is you raise wages at the bottom of the economic ladder. Robert Samuelson wrote an editorial in the Washington Post some while ago. He said: It is simply a myth that the U.S. economy needs more poor immigrants. He pointed out that in March the unemployment rate for college graduates in this country was 1.8 percent. The unemployment rate for the 13 million U.S. workers without a high school diploma is over 7 percent. Those 13 million U.S. workers without a high school diploma compete directly with the immigrant workers who come here illegally and who do not have a high school diploma. That is what puts downward pressure on wages in this country. This is. as I indicated earlier. a very difficult issue. filled with passion. and I understand that. I think there are a lot of immigrant families living in this country. perhaps many who came here without legal authorization. and many came here 5 years ago. 10. 15 years ago. 20 years ago. They have lived model lives. They have gone to school here.