Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2003 14:39:50 -0800
From: Norm Matloff <matloff@laura.cs.ucdavis.edu>
Subject: "jobs immigrants won't do"

I always respond to remarks like this by using my "hamburger analysis."
Go to a McDonald's in the Bay Area, and you are likely to find that 
both the workers in the kitchen and the workers at the cash registers 
are largely immigrant (whether here legally or not).  Go to a McDonald's 
in Oregon, and you're likely to find that the workers in the kitchen 
are immigrant but the ones at the cash registers are either 
non-immigrant teenagers or non-immigrant retirees.  Go to a Seattle 
McDonald's, and you're likely to find the whole place being 
non-immigrant teens or seniors.

The point is, employers in regions where there are very few immigrants
do quite well, thank you.  There is no shortage of people who want these
jobs in those regions.  So, the famous claim, "Immigrants do work that
natives don't want" is demonstrably false.

Continuing my "hamburger analysis," go to any In 'N Out hamburger stand
in the Bay Area.  Guess who works there?  Non-immigrant teens and
seniors!  How is it different from McDonald's?  In 'N Out pays higher
wages ($9.25/hr).

The baggage security screeners at SFO used to be almost all Filipino
immigrants.  Again, this was a job that no Americans wanted, supposedly.
But after 9/11, the government insisted that the screeners be citizens,
and lo and behold, SFO was inundated with non-Filipino applicants for
those positions.  Why hadn't they applied before?  They had!  But the
Filipino network basically hired only Filipinos.  The airport in Boise
never had any trouble finding (nonimmigrant) screeners.

Note:  I submitted an op-ed to the Chronicle along these lines a couple
of years ago.  After years of publishing my op-eds, they refused to
publish this one.

Norm