Boxer and Feinstein lie and demagogue on immigration
From this morning’s San Francisco Chronic, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein say (I’m paraphrasing): “The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Produce rotting in the field! $5 for a stalk of broccoli! Mass starvation! We are doomed!”
The truth? Low-paid illegal work force has little impact on prices.
You might assume that the plentiful supply of low-wage illegal workers would translate into significantly lower prices for the goods and services they produce. In fact, their impact on consumer prices — call it the “illegal-worker discount” — is surprisingly small.The bag of Washington state apples you bought last weekend? Probably a few cents cheaper than it otherwise would have been, economists estimate. That steak dinner at a downtown restaurant? Maybe a buck off. Your new house in Subdivision Estates? Hard to say, but perhaps a few thousand dollars less expensive.
The underlying reason, economists say, is that for most goods the labor — whether legal or illegal, native- or foreign-born — represents only a sliver of the retail price.
Feinstein’s numbers are laughable. $5 broccoli? Instead of hiring illegal aliens at $5 an hour, let’s say you had to hire American teenagers at $10 an hour –or workers from Manpower at $15 per hour. You’re telling me they’ll only be able to pick 3 or 4 heads of broccoli in an hour? American workers might be slow, but that’s a joke!
— W.C. Varones