by Justin Webb

Created on: January 11, 2007   Last Updated: April 19, 2007

Do immigrants really take the jobs we don't want to do? I don't think that at all; quite the contrary, actually. I believe that in present-day America, with the unemployment rates reaching new heights, I believe the problem is not the rejection of jobs, but the rejection with the wages offered alongside of the particular job.

Surely it's fairly obviously to see; the beginnings of the industrial revolution brought a plethora of new job opportunities to urban society. These jobs usually brought with them absolutely horrendous conditions, usually leading to various types of illnesses and cancers. Over time, muckrakers such as Upton Sinclair gashed the stitch that was sewn over the newly developed workplaces and sweatshops in the various large cities such as Chicago and New York. Unions were also formed, and pickets and boycotts became common practices workers fought back with against the factory owners.

A direct effect of this were the labor guidelines, including a new minimum wage, labor hours maximum, and eventually child labor laws also came into effect, preventing children from working in hazardous conditions.

Well, what were the owners to do? They had to find a way to compromise these new laws into their workplaces while still maintaining a decent profit consistently. Well, at this time in the United States, immigration was beginning to flourish and take shape. America was fast becoming the greatest country in the known world, the "land of opportunity."

Immigrants trying to make it in this "great" land were the owners main targets, primarily due to the fact that they could work for the bare minimum prices, while still meeting their daily quota. In some cases, they may even go over their expected quota, and their bosses may give them a penny or two bonus; well, you can see this meant more to the factory owner than the immigrant by what today knows as the "Pavlov's Dog Syndrome"-because the immigrant(s) received the penny bonus for working extra hard, they would continue to work as hard, all the while exponentially increasing the factory output and thus, fattening the owner's wallet (with dollars, not pennies!).

Well, since the owners could now hire the immigrants for less, they could fire the old factory workers that worked for more; the result is much of what you see present-day as well. With the combination of immigrants working for less or illegal aliens working for barely nothing, combined with the factories themselves moving to foreign nations where production can be continued for less money, Americans are finding more and more unemployment. It's not that we want to be unemployed, we just want the pay.

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