Video: Michelle on Pelosi, and enforcement works, part 37B

posted at 2:12 pm on March 19, 2009 by Ed Morrissey
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A new study confirms that labor costs follow the laws of supply and demand.  When illegal labor gets removed from the market, employers have to pay more to replace them.  The Hill reports on this economic breakthrough that will only shock the open-borders lobby:

As the topic of immigration and workplace raids begins to heat up again in a new administration, a new study finds that wages and employment grew for legal workers after a series of 2006 raids.

The report by Jerry Kammer of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that advocates against amnesty for illegal immigrants yet against mass deportations of the same, looked at the aftermath of six immigration raids at Swift & Co. meat-packing plants in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas, Colorado, and Utah. About 1,300 undocumented workers were arrested, and another 400 without authorization to work in the United States were detected around the same time through better company screening. …

The study estimates that about 23 percent of the plants’ employees were not authorized to work in the U.S, taking into account that the raids only targeted the first shift of the day and that the CIS investigation revealed large numbers of workers did not show up for the later, post-raid shifts.

“There is good evidence that after the raids the number of native-born workers increased significantly,” Kammer writes, noting that all of the plants were back to full production within five months. “But Swift would not provide information on how its workforce has changed. Swift also has recruited a large number of refugees who are legal immigrants.

“At the four facilities for which we were able to obtain information, wages and bonuses rose on average 8 percent with the departure of illegal immigrants.”

Quelle surprise! Eliminate undercutting labor and compensation increases.  Who’d've thunk it?  I wonder how long it took wages at those plants to rise 8% before the raids took place.  I’d guess at least three or four years.

If Congress really wanted to improve the working environment for Americans, they’d quit fooling around with Card Check and start putting a lot more resources into immigration and employment enforcement.  Oh, wait … Nancy Pelosi says that enforcing American laws duly passed by Congress is un-American.  By her reckoning, it’s a lot better to strip the rest of America’s workers of the secret ballot than to enforce the laws we pass through Congress.

The boss rips her, but good, and tackles Chris Dodd’s lie as well:

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