Healthcare and the right to work

Illegal Immigration and Rights to Work and Healthcare

Illegal immigration is a source of concern for the United States for many years now and especially in the past ten years. In the last decade, the illegal immigrant population has risen to 12 million from 5 million at the beginning of the decade. (Passel, 2006) This has resulted in public outrage and panic as people are blaming the government for not doing enough to secure the borders which is also costing millions of Americans their jobs.

It is widely believed that illegal immigration means loss of jobs for Americans as more and more undocumented workers are hired in specific industries namely agriculture and construction. This has resulted in stringent rules barring illegal immigrants from working and forbidding employers from hiring undocumented workers. But has this really solved the problem or is this even a solution?

I shall now focus on economic merits or demerits of illegal immigration to see if barring them from working is an effective solution. Immigration policy focuses on admitting only those individuals whose skills are in short supply and whose tax contributions will be really valuable to national treasury. Illegal immigrants with skills usually find jobs in certain fields but may not be able to contribute to taxes because of lack of documents. Living as an illegal immigrant however is not easy since the wages are very low and employer treatment can be harsh.

By barring them from seeking regular jobs, the government is losing millions in taxes as well as actually increasing the American loss of jobs. This is because since illegal immigrants cannot work out in the open, they are happy to accept whatever work comes their way. They usually receive low wages but a large number of them are found in agriculture and construction. (Kossoudji, 2002) These jobs automatically go to illegal immigrants because they are willing to work for less. If they were given the right to work, they could compete in open market and hence jobs in these industries could be evenly divided between American citizens and immigrants.

Barbara Ehrenreich writes: "according to a 2006 study carried out by researchers at three major universities, about three-fourths of day laborers in this country lack legal documents. Their median earnings are $700 a month, most have no access to healthcare and half of them said they had gone unpaid at one time or another. That is what makes undocumented workers so attractive to unscrupulous U.S. employers." (p. 65)

This is what adds to the problem. In its attempt to control job loss, the government has barred employers from hiring illegal immigrants but this is compounding the problem as Ehrenreich agrees: "If you don't want undocumented immigrants competing with Americans for jobs, stop the exploitation of the immigrants and make sure they work under the same laws and regulations as anyone else." (p. 65)

Scarce occupation is another argument in favor of allowing illegal immigrants to work. Some occupations have scarce supply of labor and these are the ones where illegal immigrants are found in majority. In the United States, these occupations are not just the highly skilled ones like software industry and engineering but also low-skilled ones like construction, food preparation, and cleaning services, because these are areas where U.S. native labor supply has been consistently shrinking. (Hanson, 2005)

The productivity gains from immigration are highest when skills possessed by those immigrants are scarce in supply within the country. In other words, the scarcer the skills, the higher are the gains in productivity. Immigrants fill the gap created by dearth of certain skills available at home. Illegal immigrants do exactly the same thing and are hence needed by certain industries. "A given type of worker may be scarce either because the U.S. supply of his skill type is low relative to the rest of the world, as with workers who have little schooling, or because the U.S. demand for his skill type is high relative to the rest of the world, as with computer scientists and engineers. Due to steady increases in high school completion rates, native-born U.S. workers with low schooling levels are increasingly hard to find. Yet these workers are an important part of the U.S. economy -- they build homes, prepare food, clean offices, harvest crops, and take unfilled factory jobs." (Hanson, 2007)

Another important area of debate is healthcare. Why illegal immigrants should be given access to healthcare? The rationale is simple. Better healthcare means improved health which translates into fewer communicable diseases. More than 5 million illegal immigrants are uninsured but the close quarters in which they live are breeding grounds for communicable diseases. But since they lack healthcare, many of them would never visit a doctor hence aggravating the problem. (Stahl, p. 286)

"The lack of insurance contributes to poor health, because uninsured people are more likely to delay seeking care. They are more likely to receive less or no cancer screening, which delays diagnosis and treatment and leads to premature death." (Stahl p. 287)

This means uninsured people are more likely to contribute to health problems in the country. Apart from this problem, the cost on healthcare system and especially taxpayers increases when uninsured people are given charity care at reduced or no cost. According to the law, illegal immigrants cannot be denied emergency care. The cost of emergency care is in turn borne by the taxpayers and the healthcare system. This can be avoided by making healthcare more accessible to illegal immigrants so they won't end in emergency care. "This care does impose a cost on society. It gets paid for indirectly by insured patients, whose charges are increased as a result." (Stahl, p. 287)