HOLDEN — North Dakota is like Maine: sparsely populated, rural and poor. And when Menards, a home improvement chain, couldn’t find enough workers in the city of Minot to meet the oil boom-fueled demand for building supplies, they decided to hire workers in the chain’s home state, Wisconsin.
They had a job fair. Competition was stiff. Menards flew their workers from Wisconsin back to North Dakota every week, putting them up in hotels with meal vouchers. Starting wage was $13 an hour. That’s what happens when businesses doesn’t have access to unlimited labor: They’re forced to recruit, train and hire from within the country.
Similar stories have played out whenever immigration laws were enforced and the foreign worker pool dried up. In 2006, when the Bush administration briefly engaged in job site raids, Crider Poultry in Georgia scrambled to hire unemployed Americans.
As The Wall Street Journal reported, the labor force went from 14 percent African American to 65 percent, and wages rose by $2 an hour. Similar scenarios unfolded at Swift Meats in the West and Midwest, Howard Industries in Mississippi and Smithfield Foods in North Carolina.
Record numbers of working-age Americans are not in the labor force today, and not counted in the unemployment rate. Citing Labor Department data, CNBC recently reported that 97.4 million Americans are not in the labor force, and one third of them are under 30.
In “Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis,” Nicholas Eberstadt documents the astonishing job collapse for prime-age men (those 25 to 54), identifying the most vulnerable groups – minorities and the low-skilled – and the devastating social disintegration this crisis inflicts on families.
President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers also studied joblessness among prime-age men. They concluded that declining wages and “declining labor market opportunity” were the most important contributors to joblessness: in short, too little pay and too many workers.
Congress has been clueless, infatuated with globalization and swallowing every bogus claim of dire labor shortages that demanded more foreign workers. For decades, while trade agreements eviscerated millions of manufacturing jobs, and automation was rapidly destroying more, Congress inexplicably quadrupled legal immigration and massively expanded foreign worker visas.
Congress currently gives away another 700,000 good-paying jobs every year with renewable foreign worker visas, lasting up to six years. And these aren’t berry-picking jobs. If that weren’t bad enough, they also turned a blind eye to mass illegal immigration.
The message of this election is clear: Voters demand that government start protecting American jobs and enforcing immigration laws. No excuses.
Congress created two bipartisan commissions to study immigration, and both were headed by civil rights icons: the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh in the 1980s and Barbara Jordan during the Clinton administration. Both commissions decisively opposed illegal immigration, and called on Congress to beef up enforcement. Both made it clear that enforcing immigration limits had nothing to do with hate or fear of foreign people.
In a 1994 report to Congress, Jordan declared: “The commission decries hostility and discrimination against immigrants as antithetical to the traditions and interests of the country. At the same time, we disagree with those who would label efforts to control immigration as being inherently anti-immigrant. Rather, it is both a right and a responsibility of a democratic society to manage immigration so that it serves the national interest.”
The national interest! Not well-funded, self-promoting lobbies: employers seeking cheap labor, ethnic politicians seeking to expand their base, open border/multicultural enthusiasts intent on changing our demographic or foreign governments wanting more remittances.
The commission was succinct: The linchpin to stopping illegal immigration is going after the employers. That means requiring all employers to use E-Verify, the internet system created by the federal government to verify work status.
Stolen identities and fraudulent Social Security cards will no longer enable employers to recruit and hire illegal foreign labor and claim they didn’t know what they were doing. It’s the same technology credit card companies use to verify millions of business transactions every day. It’s not radical.
When President Obama took office, one of his first actions was to require all federal contractors to use E-Verify. It’s time to mandate E-Verify for all employers, end the jobs magnet and create a level playing field for all businesses.
Unscrupulous employers and immigrant activists will whine. Smart employers, like Menards, will start recruiting, training and hiring native-born Americans, legal immigrants and refugees. And that’s the right thing to do.
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