Rep. Russell Pearce
My blog has been quiet for a week as I took some vacation time and enjoyed some of the best outdoor sights of the Arizona springtime. Now that I’m back to work, I’m detecting a whiff of hypocrisy from Rep. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, over a legislative proposal for Arizona to launch a new foreign guest-worker program.
As Capitol Media Services reported in Tuesday’s Tribune, Pearce is opposing the scope of a bipartisan measure that would allow Arizona to test a new kind of guest-worker program for low-skill workers that has been talked about for years in Washington but hasn’t been approved by Congress.
Pearce says most Arizona businesses that want such foreign workers simply aren’t willing to pay enough to attract U.S. residents to take these jobs. But oddly, Pearce is willing to admit the
U.S. has a true shortage of domestic labor in farming. Remember when folks from Pearce’s camp on illegal immigration derided Sen. John McCain’s comment that there aren’t American workers to harvest lettuce in Yuma even if they were paid $50 an hour?
Pearce apparently believes there aren’t enough Americans to farm and ranch, but somehow they are just waiting to be offered the right wages to build homes, ditch ditches and fill other manual labor posts.
The truth is the American economy already is heavily dependent on foreign labor because of declining U.S. birth rates. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated in 2005 that half of all jobs created here over the prior 15 years went to foreign workers.
Pearce and his supporters can pretend all they want that Americans will start taking manual labor jobs as wages and prices rise. But they can’t change the physical reality that there aren’t enough bodies out there to fill all of the jobs that our economy has been creating. And one of the fastest ways to strangle a robust economy is cut off or severely limit its supply of labor.
Twitter