Externalities

All employers, not just corporations, seek to externalize costs. They are just trying to improve their bottom line.An externality is when the benefit or cost of a transaction is not reflected in the price arrived at by the buyer and seller when they enter into the deal. The benefit or cost is shifted onto society.

It’s very simple: Employers gain from illegal immigration because illegal immigration increases the supply of labor in the U.S. economy (by 8 million workers), which in turn reduces the cost of labor in the United States. The lower cost of labor allows employers to hire workers at lower wages and therefore make more money. If it is a small landscaping business, the owner can make more money by hiring workers at lower wages. If it is a large, public corporation, the managers can make more money by hiring at lower wages. Some of the money will go to executives in the form of higher salaries, and some of it may go to the shareholders as higher dividends. Sometimes the employer knows they are hiring illegal immigrants; many times the employer does not because the illegal workers have fake papers (which is a federal crime). Congress has had a tendency to excuse the employers if they did not "knowingly" hire illegal aliens. This loophole has yet to be closed.

But since 80% of illegal immigrants are low-skilled, they usually earn such low wages that they turn to welfare to make ends meet. So we, the taxpayers, are subsidizing illegal aliens as they break our nation’s reasonable and duly enacted laws. And we, the taxpayers, are subsidizing employers’ increased profits due to lower labor costs. Show me an illegal alien and I’ll show you a subsidy. And, if you are purposely hiring illegal workers, you are shifting your labor costs to the public and enriching yourself while the rest of us pay taxes to provide welfare to your workers.

The market is distorted. The availability of welfare benefits to illegal immigrants acts as an inducement for them to come here and accept jobs that Americans would rather not accept because the pay is so low that you cannot take the job without going on welfare. The taxpayer burden of illegal immigration is a negative externality of the cheap labor employer-employee relationship. It is a negative externality just like pollution is. The concept of the negative externality is at the heart of environmentalism. The Pro-america, pro-environment people understand that illegal immigration imposes negative externalities on society. But I think that if you put the plain evidence in front of the Anti-America/Pro-illegal crowd that illegal immigration imposes a negative externality on society, they would deny it. It wouldn’t be politically correct for them to allow logic to lead them to an honest conclusion.

(Adapted from an essay by Charles Breiterman)