If you build it, they'll still come (Part II)

If you haven't read the first part, you can read it here. In this post I will continue to discuss the myths about illegal immigration.

The second myth: illegal immigrants are taking away jobs from US citizens. Many people that disagree with this myth would say that illegal immigrants are doing the jobs that Americans refuse to do. That argument is only partially true, because I don't believe that there's a job that Americans won't do, just a price that Americans won't do it for. Which is why many businesses not only hire illegals, but provide ways in which they can acquire fake papers and sometimes even have deals with "coyotes" (a term for those who guide illegals across the border). But the question at hand is whether or not illegal immigrants are actually taking jobs away from Americans. The way many people think about this is that there is some set number of jobs in the US, and since we already have a certain percentage of unemployed that bringing in more workers would make things worse. However, nearly all economists agree that immigrants (legal and illegal alike) create growth and more jobs than they take. Not only that, they have no adverse affect on the wages of native born citizens. Not surprisingly, Donald Huddle is about the only economist to disagree with this claim. Apparently, INS used his numbers for years despite his questionable methods:

[I]n 1981 he conducted a study by sending his graduate students out to three Houston area construction sites. The students counted the number of illegal aliens at the work sites, in part, by counting the number of workers wearing blue hats and labeling such people illegal aliens. From these numbers, Donald Huddle calculated how many Houston natives were displaced and then extrapolated this data for the entire U.S. construction industry.

Obviously, the color of a construction worker's hard hat is in no way indicative of their legal status. Blue hard hats aside, the idea that you can go to a construction site and observe which workers are legal or illegal is inaccurate and racist. And even if the numbers they collected were accurate, he used a sample of construction workers in Houston to describe the entire U.S. construction industry. In statistics, there are several acceptable forms of sampling, whether it be a simple random sample a stratified sample or a cluster sample. The basic idea is that any individual in the population has a chance of being selected. In this case, no construction site had any chance of being selected except those in Houston, which by statistical definition makes this study biased.