Have you ever heard the phrase “immigrants are stealing our jobs?” Many people have the mentality that immigrants are stealing jobs from Americans. In the article “Do immigrants “steal” jobs from American workers?” Brennan Hobban talks about how President Donald Trump promised to “implement new immigration policies that will help improve the U.S. economy and job market”(Hobban, 2017).
Brennan Hobban states that, “ immigrants may not actually be “stealing” as many U.S. jobs as Trump thinks. As she put it, “the impact of immigrant labor on the wages of native-born workers is low… However, undocumented workers often work the unpleasant, back-breaking jobs that native-born workers are not willing to do” (Hobban, 2017).
Technically immigrants are not stealing the jobs of anyone because those jobs are not taken by anyone else. It would be worse if immigrants didn’t come to fill up those jobs because then no one would be doing the work. For example, many immigrants work in the fields . Hobban writes, “Felbab-Brown explains that many of the jobs occupied by undocumented workers in the United States are physically demanding jobs that Americans do not want, such as gutting fish or work on farm fields” (Hobban, 2017).
Hobban also states that President Trump wants to prioritize entrance to those immigrants with high skills. Immigration must consist of people of all kinds of skills because in order for our society to work we need to have all kinds of people. We can’t only have well-educated people because who will take the lower back breaking jobs such as the fields and minimum wage jobs. Immigration is tied a lot to the growth of economy and jobs. Hobban states that cutting immigration will take away opportunities in the nation here: “by cutting on immigration, the country will miss an opportunity for new inventions and ventures that could generate the jobs that the president is so committed to bring back. Thus, if the current administration wants to create jobs and ‘make America great again,’ it should consider enlisting more migrants” (Hobban, 2017).
Sources:
Hobban Brennan, “Do immigrants “steal” jobs from American workers?”