The only significant impact that immigrants have on the labor market is to increase the supply of labor, which tends to put downward pressure on wages. Everything else equal, the only way an immigrant will be hired over a native worker is if he is willing to accept lower wages. In order to maximize profits, business owners look to pay the lowest wage possible without affecting marginal productivity. If an immigrant is willing to work for less, and he is productive enough, it only makes sense to choose the lower-cost labor. Billions of people the world over make this same decision on a daily basis while shopping for goods and services — it’s called bargain hunting.

Here’s the problem: the government mandates a minimum wage for citizens. The government requires that people be paid a certain amount of money per hour, and the government also mandates payroll taxes, some of which the employer must match. Toss in regulatory compliance for employers, and the cost of employment has a somewhat high floor.

Now, illegal immigrants, who can offer their labor under the table, are more than able to compete with this price because employers don’t have to pay them a minimum wage. Citizens are prevented by law from competing with illegal labor on price. As such, increasing the size of the labor market will have the adverse effect of causing citizens to be in a position where they will lose their jobs because they are forced to keep their wages high.

The proper solution to this problem, then, is the deregulation of the labor market. Allowing an increase in the labor market without allowing citizens to compete on price is cruel and unjust, and therefore migrant workers should be prevented from coming to the United States until the federal government has removed the fetters binding American labor.

What I find both refreshing and maddening about this letter is its open and unapologetic racism combined with a total lack of appreciation for the irony of the author’s position. Most Americans are a little more guarded in expressing their racism these days, even when they share the same views. But in South Carolina it is apparently open season on Mexican immigrants, and they darn well better keep their hands off our white women if they want to keep shopping at Walmart!

Wow.

It’s refreshing to get this blind hatred out into the light where we can at least see it, and I thank the author for doing that. Usually this stuff breeds in the dark. If everyone who thought these things said them out loud right away, we could then discuss them on the spot and dispel a lot of ignorance. Discussion would be a good thing. Sadly, we rarely get the chance to take it that far.

The irony of course is that no one promotes cheap labor and abusive labor prices as ruthlessly and effectively as Walmart. Those low, low prices come at the cost of American jobs, and you don’t have to be an economist to see that. The $19.95 CD player you picked up on sale under the ubiquitous smiley face was almost certainly made by Chinese workers who earn less than the cost of the item itself for an entire week’s work. Recently Walmart lost a lawsuit brought against it by its own employees for not providing them with legally required work breaks and for forcing them to work off the clock on pain of losing their jobs.

So clearly, the easier and more rational way to avoid being annoyed by Mexican immigrants at Walmart is to stop shopping at Walmart, but the problem is that many Americans have come to believe it is their God-given right to get the cheapest prices available on earth and damn the consequences. They shouldn’t have to think when they shop. They should just be able to consume at the pace they have grown accustomed to, regardless of economic conditions. That’s what we are after all; we’re consumers, right? We have to be able to consume things, and cheaply. It’s the American way.

Corporate responsibility is not a concept many American consumers understand or want to understand. And yet, somebody has to be blamed for the inconveniences in their personal lives. Mexican immigrants as a group do fit the bill. They don’t or won’t speak English, so it’s easy to blame them. (No back talk, except from people like me).

This is how scapegoats are born, and our country can’t keep functioning the way it is now without them. That’s what I want to focus on here:

Our country can’t keep functioning this way without scapegoats.

I want to focus on this because it has come to the attention of even oblivious Walmart shoppers that our country currently isn’t functioning very well. I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that our country has, in fact, become dysfunctional. In order to stay dysfunctional, we have to manufacture targets of blame for the obvious and growing problems we face: We need scapegoats. Without scapegoats, we’d have to look at the real, complex causes of our current problems, and if we do that, everything will change. Scapegoats help us to maintain the status quo, no matter how much the status quo stinks.

Like the saying goes, better the devil you know.

So, here for your shopping pleasure is a short list of some of the hottest and cheapest scapegoats around right now. Grab one while you still can! (I’m reasonably certain all of them can be found at Walmart.)

Mexican immigrants. They’re taking our jobs and ruining our country. Great jobs Americans would love to do like picking tobacco or working in slaughterhouses or roofing suburban homes in the dead heat of summer at sub-minimum wage. Let’s get serious for a minute here: Jobs that pay wages Americans can actually live on are not being snapped up by illegal immigrants. Those good jobs are going overseas to China and India. So blame your bad luck on Mexicans if you want to, while you can. Soon, however, there won’t be any good jobs for people born here, at which point you will have to be a little nicer if you want to get hired to pick tomatoes with these folks.

Married gays. It’s not the fact that the American auto industry is DOA or that the price of gasoline is on its way to Mars or that we are dumping enormous sums of money into a war we can’t win that is hurting our country’s economy right now; it’s those pesky homosexuals, always out in public doing pesky gay things like picking out drapes and going to the gym. Now they want to get married. No wonder we are doomed. God will now smite us with forest fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, and gay divorce lawyers. Hard to believe that the last election was largely won by simply invoking the power of homophobia, but it was. All of you people who voted for George Bush just so Adam and Steve wouldn’t get a marriage license, how is that working out for you now? (And by the way, Adam and Steve? Yeah, you two, out in California? Congratulations! High five!)

Stupid poor people. As you probably point out constantly to everyone you know, America is crawling with people who are way stupider than you. If those people sign papers with predatory lenders that take all their money and then repo their homes, it’s their own damn fault. Doesn’t matter if they are in their 90s and live on an $800 a month Social Security check, they should have planned better when they were younger. Now they are bringing down the whole country with their stupid stupidity by way of too many foreclosures. Alleged fraud and book-cooking at Fannie Mae or Countrywide is beside the point. Those nice, ambitious young brokers who invented ways to package and trade mortgage loans as securities, ways that completely erased who held the bad debts? Those nice boys were just trying help your stock portfolio increase in value.

We should never blame Wall Street or the finance industry for their own disasters because the market is self-regulating. Ronald Reagan said so and ever since then this is the official prayer of all rich people. High rolling high finance=good. Stupid poor people=bad. Always remember that every advantage in your own life was won solely through your own efforts with no help from anyone, ever, and every disadvantage of poverty is due to the stupidity and laziness of poor people. Keep thinking that way, and pay no attention to that self-portrait hanging in your den that for some reason is aging rapidly and taking on the visage of a depraved, self-indulgent monster. Oh yes, and hang onto your money. Tight. It’s yours, all yours.

Negroes. Come on, can’t you do any better than that? If you are still holding onto this one, you are probably over 80 and aren’t reading this anyway, and you may not have even noticed that a black guy is currently running for president. Speaking of that guy, lots of working class people, especially working class white guys, are uncomfortable with this candidate’s inexperience at this critical time in our nation’s history. It’s nothing to do with his race at all; it’s his inexperience. Uh-huh. Where was all your concern when George Herbert Walker Bush’s prodigal son wanted to be President? You know which son I mean: the same son that ran every thing he ever touched right into the ground, including oil companies gifted to him by Pappy’s friends, companies that were practically fool-proof money makers, and the entire state of Texas. Where was all your concern back then? Honestly, you guys aren’t fooling anybody.

That’s my short list. I know it could be longer but I have to end this rant somewhere.

The truth is, we have serious problems that will take a degree of unity to solve that we haven’t seen in this country in my entire lifetime. We just can’t afford to tear at each other when we are losing our place as a world power and endangering the whole planet with our waste and pollution. We have to look at the problems themselves and start producing products and services, not scapegoats.

Once upon a time, long ago and for a brief but shining period, we were more than consumers. We were merchants, craftsmen, workers, artists, and builders.

Wouldn’t it be great to get back to that time before it’s too late?

Researchers in many countries have attempted to develop methods for estimating numbers of unauthorized migrants in order to provide data for use in improving immigration controls and help increase the accuracy of population estimates for use in governance. However, this has proved to be a formidable task given the clandestine nature of unauthorized migration and the vested interest of such migrants in remaining hidden from the authorities. With the use of creative methods, some success has been achieved but only with large margins of error.

Legalizing Incentives

Methods of counting unauthorized migrants fall broadly into two categories: direct and indirect. Direct methods involve the use or collection of data relating specifically to this group. Particularly valuable direct data collection opportunities arise when governments implement regularization programs as occurred in the U.S. in 1986. At best, however, the data generated from such programs only provides a rough indication of numbers of unauthorized migrants since eligibility for regularization usually depends on meeting certain conditions such as a minimum residence period; moreover, it is impossible to tell what percentage of eligible applicants actually apply for regularization.

Since many unauthorized migrants will take up employment in their new country, employer surveys are another means of collecting data on them. Some employer surveys have been quite successful in generating information on the nature and distribution of illegal working. However, their use in providing information on the size of the unauthorized migrant population is limited. For one thing, illegal working is not synonymous with illegal residence – some workers may hold valid residence visas but be prohibited from employment. Moreover, some unauthorized migrants may be working in areas not covered by the surveys or may be economically inactive. Similarly, immigration enforcement data on detections of unauthorized migrants are likely to capture only a small proportion of the whole illegal population.

Creating Blanks and Filling Them In

Indirect methods of counting unauthorized migrants involve comparing different sources of data and making inferences. The “residual” statistical method has been used by both U.S. and UK government statisticians in recent years. Basically, this involves comparing census and immigration data from two different points in time relating to the foreign-born known to be resident in the country. The data is used to calculate the “residual” population, defined as the total number of foreign-born residents minus all legal immigrants and temporary legal migrants, with data adjusted for mortality and emigration over time. A small proportion of the residual population is assumed to be quasi-legal, including those awaiting the outcome of an asylum application; the remainder is defined as population of unauthorized migrants.

The residual method was used to estimate that there were approximately seven million unauthorized migrants in the U.S. in January 2001, equating to around 2.5% of the total population. Within the UK, this method was used to arrive at a central estimate of 430,000 unauthorized migrants as at April 2001 or 0.7% of the population. Both estimates were acknowledged to have very large margins of error; the UK study noted, for example, that the actual figure was likely to be anywhere within the range of 310,000 to 570,000 depending on different assumptions that could be made in the statistical model. Critics have argued that these figures vastly underestimate the true scale of unauthorized migrations; more recent U.S. studies have put the likely numbers of illegal immigrants as closer to 11 or 12 million and even as high as 20 million.

The answer to the question “Can unauthorized migrants be counted?” seems to be “Yes but not all of them.” Innovative techniques including qualitative research might be used to find out more about the characteristics of unauthorized migrants, but the shifting target of their total number within a country is likely to remain elusive and subject to debate.