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Illegal Immigration Harms Innovation

By Cliff Johns

The current situation of permitting illegal immigration is harming innovation in America, and thus diminishing our unique capacity to deliver innovations better, faster and with more value than any country in the history of the world.  Illegal immigrants are here for simple reasons: they are willing to enter our country by unauthorized paths even to the point of exposing themselves to severe personal and sometimes deadly risks by entering through non-official portals (especially those along the southern border states), US employers are willing to violate the law and hire the illegals who do manage to get in only to employ them in low or no-skill labor functions, the illegal immigrants are willing to work for very low wages compared to a legal resident.  That these illegal immigrants and their illegal US employers can engage in such enterprise with apparent immunity and control has led to some 10-15 million illegals from sea to shinning sea spread increasingly all over the fruited plain.  I was no fan of Clinton whose shenanigans were never limited to this sort of thing, but why is the current administration allowing it to continue now to a point where one in 10 Mexican citizens is in now in the US, ILLEGALLY! 

So what are all these illegal immigrants and their illegal employers doing?  Some are landscapers, fruit and veggie pickers, roofers, day-laborers, janitors, and on and on.  Some have likely cleaned my office but when asked they always say they are legal.  They are hired by a contractor whom we in turn have hired who themselves say the same thing, they are legal.  But in all reality, how do I know? 

Some argue that illegal immigrants and their illegal employers are doing jobs Americans are not willing to do.  I say, rubbish.  If you advertised today that you would pay $30/ hour to clean a toilet tomorrow, I would venture to say that you would have a line of US legal residents as well as illegal immigrants and their illegal employers  lined up to do the task before noon.  On the other, hand if you want it done for $2/hour I imagine that every single US legal resident would leave the line, but the illegal immigrants and their illegal employers would remain.  So if I get the job done for $2/hour then I’ve got $28/hour to keep for me and save or spend on other things.  Right?  A quick review of the US Dept. of Commerce shows that most US legal residents are not saving at all; they are spending, or more specifically they are consuming more.  In essence they are consuming more because they can. 

If we did not have illegal immigrants to do the job for $2/hour, how long would you be willing to pay $30/hour to clean the toilet?  A day? A week? A year?  In our wonderful capitalistic society bent on free markets, I bet it would not be long before there were all kinds of innovations to clean the toilet easier, cheaper and FASTER.  American inventors would be loosed on this ‘toilet’ challenge and all kinds of patents would quickly result.  Factories would be built to make the inventions and the whole market thing would propagate until everyone was either satisfied with the invention they were using or the amount they were willing to pay per hour.  The lack of low cost labor would lead to the need (market) for inventions because those in the market (consumers) had determined that $30/hour is just too much to spend for cleaning a toilet over the long haul. 

Low cost labor, available with illegal immigrants cooperating with their illegal employees, is not a normal market force and in our market is unnatural, since our law says they really shouldn’t be here in the first place.  So we end up with what we do not want….the unintended consequence of stifling this innovation. 

Lack of innovation is what often describes the countries were the immigrants come from in the first place.   Mexicans, for example, while there are a good number of equally cleaver Mexicans doing new and novel inventions, on a per capita or any real basis, they are a drop in the bucket compared to the inventions and innovations produced in a single week in the US.  Prove it to yourself by comparing which countries produce the most inventions around the world. 

Accordingly, how can an innovative country, such as the US, possibly benefit from this illegal immigrant assault which serves to drive innovation out of the market, not in?   

Low cost illegal labor and their partners in crime, the US illegal employers, thus are interfering with the natural market forces that would give rise to innovation.  How can doing so be good?  Clearly it is not.  Being bad alone is not enough to stop the social egalitarians from interfering and insist that these millions of illegals remain and even be given amnesty and more.  They are naive and fail to recognize the constitutional mandate for private property rights. 

We have legal ways for immigrants to enter.  It is expensive and takes time and energy.  Good things usually do.  That illegals may always lack the resources to immigrate legally is no consequence to those who do manage to scrimp and save to get here legally.  Why would we treat immigrants differently and thus reward those who break our laws and penalize those who abide by them?  Consider too that those who abide by our laws are more likely to be innovators themselves since we would be growing the innovative environment for all in the US, immigrants and residents alike.

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