As noted in the Site Overview section. One of the most widespread misconceptions about immigration is that it plays a very needed and vital, even essential, role in the economy, “doing the jobs American won’t do” in Jorge W. Bush’s words in support of a “temporary” guest worker program (aka amnesty). Without foreign nationals to work in our restaurants, dissect our cows, hogs and chickens, landscape our yards, pick our fruit and lettuce in California, etc., along with all the other positions now typically filled by immigrant labor, (predominantly illegals), so the arguments goes, all theses functions would go unperformed. Our lettuce would rot in the fields, our burgers if we could get them at all would have to be served raw, and we’d have to buy our chickens live and butcher them ourselves like in Mexico, as no Americans nowadays can be found to fill these positions, no matter that Americans had filled these positions for our entire history.

The argument that such labor is irreplaceable and cannot be filled at all by Americans is, as with almost any “irreplaceable labor” argument, acknowledged as bogus to any trained economist. This is particularly but certainly not limited to jobs at the lower end of the pay-scale. They note that as with most if not all labor availability issues, the question is actually one of cost. Workers can certainly be found for low-wage type positions, provided the wage is not too low. In these case Americans allegedly cannot be found to take positions at the salary and working conditions they are now paying, at least as easily as a foreign national can be found, so a purported “shortage” exists.

Clearly what is happening therefore in our economy is not a creation of a new category of positions, which only immigrant labor had done before. Rather what is happening is a massive shift in our economy, with positions which had previously been performed by Americans being transferred to immigrants, generally being downgraded to a lesser or greater extent somewhere in the process. It is just hyperbole to say no Americans can be found to take these positions, even though hyperbole often dominates discussions of immigrant issues. But if Americans are paid and treated adequately they certainly can be found for such positions, as they have been in the past. The issue to anyone with the remotest degree of understanding and/or honesty is rather the economic issue, the savings achieved through the use of generally undocumented foreign labor versus the costs. Costs being generally born by the community and other institutions and agencies, the immediate short term benefits to employers in many low-wage occupations like meat packing appear clear-cut, as besides being willing to work for lower wages they are informally exempt from most labor regulations and benefit requirements. The decision is often made to employ immigrant labor on a massive scale. For the affected communities like Guymon and our society as a whole however the cost/benefit equation is more complicated, and only to the most ardent immigrationist unequivocally positive. If the hiring companies make somewhat hire profits and consumers pay slightly less, for their hamburgers or chickens, there are also clearly enormous costs at times for communities strongly affected by immigration such as Guymon, who face the necessity to revamp and expand their entire network of social services, from housing to schools to low-income services and police protection, to deal with the influx of Spanish speaking immigrants working in the local meat processing industry.

Going beyond the local and anecdotal, the economics of the respective benefits and costs of immigration has been the subject of a much debate nationwide, even if the pro-immigration point of view, through the support of pro-immigration employer groups of highly visible pro-immigration economic organizations like the Cato Institute and Manhattan Institute often are what is initially visible in the press. The debate has pitted the pro-immigration economists, of which Julian Simon and students of his like Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute were the most visible, versus noted critics of the economic benefits of immigration like Harvard economist George Borjas. The economic interpretations certainly differ, but even the dean of immigrationism Julian Simon himself admitted in his most famous book that from a purely economic point of view “immigration is not necessary – we could do quite nicely without it”.

There are lengthy and involved economic studies of the comparative cost/benefits of immigration from a number of sources, and Vdare contains access to a number of articles dissecting the typical fallacies of some of the pro-immigration propaganda immigration supporters like Bush typically like to cite. For the purposes of this site section however, our goal is to demonstrate that whatever the overall benefits to employers and national corporations and organizations, and the Oklahoma elites closely aligned with their interests, immigration has an strong and quite demonstrably uniform effect on the employment prospects, wages, and overall economic conditions across the board in Oklahoma, whether it relates to working and economic conditions in the small towns of rural Oklahoma, low-wage positions in the service and/or manufacturing sector of our big cities, to some of the supposedly most desirable positions in hi-tech, science and engineering associated with our research universities and other leading and progressive industries and employers in Oklahoma.

To discuss issues of wage and employment issues for Oklahoma, always a prominent topic of discussion among state officials, journalists, and civic leaders, without discussing or planning to deal with the effects of immigration makes any such discussion terribly incomplete, and lacking, and assures that any policies adopted based on such discussions will be ineffectual.