Illegal immigrants hurt Oregon workers

Do illegal immigrants benefit Oregon's economy? Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek and Sen. Michael Dembrow believe so.

Both Portland Democrats recently called for federal action to legalize the presence of many so-called "undocumented" workers. To make their case, Kotek and Dembrow leaned heavily on a study titled "The Contributions of New Americans in Oregon," published recently by the Michael Bloomberg-founded Partnership for a New American Economy.

The study, however, is riddled with omissions and misrepresentations that mask illegal immigrants' harm to Oregonians — particularly the most economically vulnerable among them. One of the study's most dubious claims: Oregon's illegal immigrants "are not displacing the U.S.-born, but rather taking jobs few Americans are interested in pursuing."

The study places the number of illegal immigrants in Oregon at about 114,000. (The immigration control advocacy group, Federation for American Immigration Reform, however, puts the number at 170,000.) Eighty-five percent of them, says the Partnership for a New American Economy, are "in the prime of their working years, or ranging in age from 25 to 64." The great majority of illegal immigrants are also poorly-educated: "It is currently estimated that 57 percent of the adult illegal-immigrant population (has) not completed high school," Vernon M. Briggs Jr., professor emeritus at Cornell University, wrote recently.

What does that mean for the job prospects of Oregon's lower-skilled U.S. citizens? The law of supply and demand is simple: A huge influx of lower-skilled illegal immigrants will create an oversupply of labor in industries that rely heavily on manual workers. That oversupply will intensify competition between illegal immigrants and lower-skilled American workers. And it will depress wages to the point where many American workers can't afford to take them — but illegal immigrants will.

Illegal immigrants comprise some 5 percent of the U.S. labor force. In Oregon in 2014, they "made up 13.3 percent of all employees in (the) accommodation and food-services industry, a sector that includes dishwashers, food-preparation workers, and short-order cooks," the Partnership for a New American Economy report says. "They also accounted for more than 1 in 10 workers employed in the administrative, support, and waste-management services sector, as well as 28.1 percent of workers in the agriculture industry."

Is this evidence that Americans shy from physically-arduous jobs? No. In Montana, South Dakota, Vermont and other lower-immigration states, crops still get harvested, lawns mowed and tables bussed — overwhelmingly by U.S. citizens. As per Americans and manual work, "the only catch is that they want to make enough money to actually be able to support their families," writes David Seminara of the Center for Immigration Studies. "When companies offer attractive wages and benefits, they generally have little trouble finding American workers to do jobs in ... fields like garbage collection, custodial work and dishwashing."

But when illegal immigrants overinflate the labor supply, take jobs, and drive down wages and benefits, they contribute to environments like in Oregon. Here, some 220,000 people — most of them American — are officially unemployed, "marginally attached to the labor force" or part-time workers wanting full-time work, according to the state Employment Department.

Clearly, a plethora of cheap illegal labor harms Oregon's lowest-skilled U.S. citizens. Rather than champion illegal immigrants, Kotek and Dembrow should introduce bills in the 2017 legislative session mandating that state employers use the federal E-Verify system to vet new hires for proof of legal U.S. presence. This would help shrink Oregon's illegal-immigrant population and, in doing so, re-employ jobless Americans — the people to whom elected state officials are responsible.

Richard F. LaMountain, a Cedar Mill resident, is vice president of Oregonians for Immigration Reform.