Excess labor is the only necessary condition for exploitation.
The next time someone says "immigrants do the jobs 'Americans won't do," please remember this story from The Wall Street Journal's Patrick Thomas about the living conditions of Haitian immigrants working for the global food company JBS in Greeley, Colorado:
"They slept on the floor, as many as eight to a room, and cooked meals on hot plates on the carpet....
"....The supervisor, himself an immigrant from the African nation of Benin, set up others to stay in a five-bedroom, two-bathroom unit he had leased in a house in town. There, too, they slept on floors. At one point, 30 or more people were living there, workers said. When the power went out in the winter, they cooked in their coats. They were charged $60 a week in rent."
They cooked their coats for heat.
Why should any American want that job?
Why should any American want that job for an immigrant?
Why should any job in America reduce a laborer to such conditions?
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Tell Congress that high immigration creates a labor glut, which is the only necessary condition for exploitation.
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Meatpacking was a good job when immigration was low
"It's a canard that Americans won't slaughter pigs, sheep and cows. How do we know this? Because immigration to the United States was more or less banned from 1925 to 1965, and millions of pigs, sheep and cows were slaughtered during those years. But they were slaughtered by American-born workers, earning middle-class wages."
- Edward McClelland, "The Real Reason the Middle Class Is Dead"
Meatpacking has always been a hard job. But it hasn't always been an exploitative one. And it needn't be one today.
Back in the Gilded Age, when the Great Wave brought flotillas of new foreign workers into American ports every week, the conditions in meatpacking plants were horrendous. The writer Upton Sinclair appealed to America's consciousness in his novel, The Jungle:
"Here was a population, low-class and mostly foreign, hanging always on the verge of starvation, and dependent for its opportunities of life upon the whim of men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave drivers..."
Conditions began to radically change almost exactly 100 years ago, when Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1924 that ended the Great Wave.
"Even during the Great Depression of the 1930s, working conditions improved. Due to low immigration and tight labor markets, unions grew stronger so that by the 1950s through the 1970s, meatpacking work was one of the safest and highest paid lower-skilled jobs in America."
- Roy Beck, The Case Against Immigration
In 1980, meatpacking workers made $33/hr (adjusted to 2024 values). By 2007, meatpacking wages had plummeted by half, and remain close to $16/hr today.
A scandal across the country
Thomas' reporting describes a scenario where JBS and immigrant recruiters take advantage of loose immigration laws to profit from the exploited workers. This is not an isolated event. Take a look at this 21-minute mini documentary. The puzzle pieces really start to come together at the 12:34 minute mark.
The meatpacking industry is a microcosm of how industry takes advantage of loose immigration policies to bypass American workers, exploit immigrants, privatize the profits, and socialize the costs.
What is an "immigrant's job"
One Haitian worker who spoke to the WSJ said the work conditions were "worse than being in jail."
"A lot of [Americans] simply won't do it," according to the Mayor. Won't take a job that's worse than being in jail? Sounds pretty reasonable! Listen to the residents of Cherleroi, PA in the documentary above. They know that American workers would take those jobs if they were jobs worthy of being called "American jobs."
The story ends on a particularly sad note, with one immigrant worker seemingly resigned to being taken advantage of, saying "it's an immigrant's job."
It doesn't have to be this way.
Economics 101 with Sir Angus Deaton
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