Jobs Americans Won’t Do, and the Economics of Mass Low-Skilled Immigration

On the Laura Ingraham show, Thomas Sowell blasted Paul Ryan’s argument that we need immigration “reform” in order to avert labor shortages:

That’s incredible. I mean-—first of all to an economist, it is incredible to speak about shortages without talking about prices, in this case wages…You know there, there have been so many predictions of shortages of so many occupations and the shortages don’t materialize. And why not? Because if there is a shortage, the wage rate goes up. That attracts in more people and lo and behold, the jobs are filled.
In agriculture, the farmers would obviously prefer to get workers who get low pay rather than workers they have to pay a higher wage. And as long as there are an unlimited supply of farm workers coming in from Mexico, they will never have to raise the wages very much. They say Americans won’t do these jobs. These are jobs Americans have done for generations, if not centuries. And it’s a time when millions of Americans are out of work, and are looking for any kind of work. And so this is utter nonsense.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/07/jobs-americans-wont-do-and-the-economics-of-mass-low-skilled-immigration.php