Because job displacement doesn’t affect the middle class and is a laughably absent phenomenon for the upper class.

Immigration has massively different outcomes depending on the perspective of which class you’re viewing it from.

Let’s start off with the middle class. For many, this means nice homes, in nice suburban neighborhoods, with nice schools, nice job opportunities, and the type of environment where they are sure to send their children on to at least not have a worse life then they have, assuming their kids don’t get addicted to their mom’s prescription anti-depressants and spiral into a fit of nihilistic self-harm. For this group, the types of immigrants they see look like them in all but skin color. They are highly educated, easily adaptable, and easily assimilate into whatever local culture they are a part of. This is because they usually come into the country with highly valued skills that are harder to find among the America’s native population. It becomes easy to imagine when you consider our three hundred million people competing against a possible seven billion, all wanting the same cookie cutter home in a wealthy American suburb.

These types of immigrants come with very few problems to the native population around them. They don’t bring crime. They add the superficial diversity many people like to say they are friends with. And their presence brings new and interesting food, while not suffering terribly the ill-effects of competition in opportunity rich environments when minimum wage isn’t a limiting factor. Their skills are scarce and not allowing them to come in would not only harm a few companies that can’t find the right talent for hard to fill jobs, but create industry choke points that would do massive damage throughout the economy.

This is why most people, even conservatives stereotyped for hating all immigrants, don’t really have much of a problem with this type of immigrant. Their presence does demonstrably and undeniably add to the United States in a way that, until we fix education to be more fair (primarily among another group I’ll discuss later) America needs.

Saying again for emphasis, this is the only type of immigrant that most middle class individuals typically deal with. Yippee for them.

For the upper income class, immigration is an even greater story of obvious success and the need for diversity. We look to immigrants like South Africa’s Elon Musk, as well as many others, and we see that the most successful and prosperous country in the world with the most opportunities for wealth acquisition will attract many of the greatest minds alive.

When these people come into the country, they don’t just fill necessary skill gaps. They actively create companies like Telsa, and even whole industries, like privatizing freaking space flight. In those cases, they do create a massive number of crucial and necessary jobs — for some. At least one study even linked nearly half of all Fortune 500 companies in the United States to being created by immigrants or their children

That’s why almost no one does it. Of course, let’s not assume that many people working at SpaceX do so for less than minimum wage.

It’s important to remember that there is a distinction and that not all immigrants, or even whole categories of immigrants, are the same. Just as important, nor are people who interact with them. So viewing the problem from other people’s perspectives is necessary to find a holistic solution that acknowledges that some people are helped by immigration, and others are hurt by it.

Depending on your geography or your economic status, you may only interact with people like I’ve described, or deal with a different class of immigrant altogether. It’s very easy to dismiss the arguments I’m about to make when all you’ve ever seen are cases where immigration is positive and helpful not just to your local economy, but to you in particular.

The type of immigration that people fight against, where there is the strongest disruption to the lives of whole classes of American citizens is illegal immigration and particularly illegal immigration from the Southern border.

There, illegal immigration accounts for millions upon millions of people. My town, as an example, is a rural town in Oklahoma. We had a Hispanic population around 5% during the 1970 census. Now, for 2020, it’s likely closer to 50–55%. In talking to many of the people here, even other Hispanics will freely admit that at least a quarter of them are illegal immigrants. These immigrants are not competing for the highest paid jobs or those that create other industries. They aren’t even trying for a “better life” and “better future” for themselves and their families. Many, if not most, view their time in the United States as a temporary condition.

The types of jobs they do are mostly low pay, low skill jobs that to an American provides very little. However, to an immigrant from very poor countries in Central and South America, these manual labor jobs provide a great deal of wealth if your plan is to save up to retire back in your home country, or if you are sending home money in the form of remittances. Remittances are moneys that are sent overseas by people in one country to people in another. They have massive impacts on local economies because labor income doesn’t recirculate as it normally would for citizen labor, but instead leaves the economy forever. According to the following PEW study, 42% of all remittances went to the Americas with $28 billion going to Mexico alone.

If your local economy has a high number of illegal immigrants, or even many legal ones, and it is a poorer region of the country, disregarding anything else that may go on, you will feel this gradual draining of income wealth over the period of decades as the American economy is not structured to support it. Where it comes to jobs, that reduction in economic churning, where money spent on labor is given back to the local economy by way of shopping and buying services, damages the prospects for other forms of job creation, both legal and otherwise.

As for the work itself, perhaps wealthier Americans really don’t want to do those jobs. Probably, they don’t. There is a certain sense of… self-importance… that many educated people in the United States have that value in society is determined by education, pay, and strange sense of self-esteem as mattering in a real and economic sense. I was the same way for much of my youth. Jobs like being a plumber, construction worker, or even in the military, are looked down upon in academic settings, including the public school system, as something that is somewhat of a punishment for bad choices in school. This is taught to children from a very early age, that the goal should be a good job where they sit in air-conditioned offices and wear ties or high heels.

What is lost is a respect for hard work among many, which does push many from feeling that manual labor, at any point in their lives, is beneath them or a sign of shame and failure. Ironically, this has caused many licensed labor jobs, like electrician and plumbing, to skyrocket in costs, where these lowly jobs often command very high wages for less than attractive work. Secondary effects of that are that the poor now can no longer afford these necessary services and wow is that a sucky problem that no one wants to untangle or deal with. So there is a phenomenon of many Americans not wanting to do many “hard-work” jobs, but that more often than not, centers on a certain bigotry that we are taught as children towards people who have them.

But for many, many others, it is that they are simply denied the choice.

In places where illegal immigration isn’t policed well, it is very easy for companies to exploit and hire exclusively through illegal immigration. Remember that my town has gone from 5% to 50% Hispanic population in the span of a single generation and many, many of them live in the country illegally with many more born to illegal immigrants in the United States. We’ve seen a drastic change in the demography of the area. From that, two major examples show that in places like my town, saying “Americans don’t want to do those jobs” matters very little when no one can, as in is legally compete for the wages paid to illegal immigrant workers.

I have two specific examples in mind, the first being a grandfather of one of my former students. Also an illegal immigrant himself, he began a construction business in our community. That alone isn’t a problem, but then he went around the legal methods that I would have to follow if I had wanted to start a similar business, and hired exclusively illegal workers. When a construction crew is illegally working for about 60% of what you can pay legal residents because said crew doesn’t pay taxes on the labor, that allows the company to prosper in ways those following the law can’t. This business model didn’t just earn him more business, it out competed all legal competition to where the entire community now has very few choices besides illegal immigrant labor, for a necessary service.

Another example, again from the same community, was a factory that made cookies. At one point, my town was responsible for 40% of the girl scout cookies in the nation. My mom worked there when she was in high school. It always had the capacity to employ about 10% of the town. That’s a big deal. At some point, though, the cookie factory was sold to foreign ownership. That’s when things started to change inside. The big open secret here is that, no one knew anyone who worked at the cookie factory. That’s a big deal, too. In a town of 3,000 people, it really is one of those “everybody knows everybody” towns. Yet, nobody knew anybody that worked in a factory where 10% of the town is employed. That is because the line was mostly illegal immigrant workers brought in via Mexico, South and Central American. There have been ICE raids in the past, but for reasons that escape me, within a few weeks, new workers are bused in and the process starts anew. The background information on that is complicated, and you can find more on it here: What does Jon Davis think of President Trump's proposed wall on the Mexican border?

This also isn’t about race, as in, “Whites and everyone else.” It’s about ensuring that the Americans citizens who are the worst off aren’t marginalized more by ideologically naive immigration policy that places the welfare of non-Americans above that of our own most in need. While this hurts the white population of the town, most of whom are far less privileged than the average American, the blacks and native population of Oklahoma (those most vulnerable already) also can’t get started in the ladder of opportunity because there are no entry level positions available for most young workers. This pattern of hurting all poor people, regardless of race, is an invisible stigma that is all but unallowed in polite society.

Remember, that factory job was one my mom worked at in High School and which would have been denied her if she were that age today. The construction jobs would have been the sort of jobs I would have had in high school, which would have been denied me today. Those jobs are necessary foot in the door opportunities for young people and the poor to develop necessary job skills and work history to leverage into better opportunities. Later on. In America, almost everyone starts off poor, but competing with illegal immigration ensures some economic classes and geographies are denied the ability to climb that ladder because they are never allowed to make the first step.

That is, unless they take the incredibly condescending and narrow scoped advice of people born in very different realities to just “learn to code.”

Looking at this systemically, you become aware of an almost tyrannical hierarchy in the way it upsets the normal progression of work for most people. Those with values that make them want to stay near their homes and families are difficult, and those that prosper must be those who flee to wealthier cities. A small class of those with connections outsides of the small towns move, leaving only two other groups: a very small wealthy class who mostly inherited prosperity and wealth from previous generations of our prosperity, and a servant class of expendable immigrant labor. A third is a welfare class of desperate citizens at the bottom who have no means of leaving their situation and bitter about all traditional routes to success (work hard, study hard, get a good job) lost to them.

For this group, the bottom 10–30% of Americans, encompassing white, black, Native, and legal Hispanic citizens, en masse illegal immigration is devastating to their work and career prospects. People who say things like, “illegal immigrants do the jobs that Americans don’t want to,” including many Republicans like George W. Bush during his time, live lives divorced from the realities of the minority of Americans who need that chance. They don’t live in areas where it is difficult to find entry level positions where someone who is willing to sweat can climb up to management and a good career without a degree and relocation. They haven’t seen large populations who stagnate by living off the pennies from heaven that is government run welfare programs.

In truth, there are many, many Americans who would never debase themselves to do the work that illegal immigrants do for many of us. But most of them never had to. For others, that class of work must remain available for the most marginalized individuals in the country to have a chance to take part in the opportunities the rest of America takes for granted.

Relaxed. Researched. Respectful. - War Elephant

Footnotes