I don’t think you can get more emblematic of the modern beltway class than this notion that US troops should be sent overseas and should not protect US borders. It fires on all cylinders: What they used to call imperialism is now the only moral use for the army. And that farm and industrial workers should make less money by undercutting their jobs with people coming here illegally and forcing those jobs overseas.

They denigrate Americans as lazy and snobbish for not wanting to do the jobs that they themselves have made it almost impossible to hire Americans for.

My mom used to do some of those “jobs Americans won’t do”, which in our farm-based area meant picking asparagus and other fruit and vegetables. Many women did that to pick up extra money to improve their families’ incomes and save for their kids’ education.

She did not stop doing it because she didn’t want to do those jobs. I’m pretty she never wanted to do those jobs, but she did them anyway. She, along with the other women, stopped doing it because the farms stopped hiring them.

She wasn’t alone. An Ace of Spades commenter writing under the nom de plume notsothoreau wrote about their experience in farm work:

I used to work cherry harvest. Typically you work 10 hour days straight for about 21 days. When I started, high school kids could still work there. Then Washington passed a law that kids under 18 could only work up to 60 hours a week and there were also limits on the hours in the day they could work. It wasn’t worth it to the company and they stopped hiring them.

The farms stopped hiring people like my mom because it became progressively more expensive to hire part-time workers due to the regulatory burden per employee. They stopped hiring people like “notsothoreau” because they were no longer allowed to hire high school kids for short bursts of long hours—arguably something teenagers are well-suited for, and which many prefer over longer-term commitments.

Unfortunately, bullshit isn’t “prohibido”. Even the signs are bullshit. This is more for motorists than for people here illegally: if families were ever the main unit of immigration, that’s long since gone in this age of fentanyl and human trafficking.

The paperwork and other added regulatory expenses made it too expensive to hire the Americans who wanted to do these jobs. The paperwork for hiring someone here illegally is by necessity a lot less than for hiring citizens and legal immigrants.

The actual wage difference is always important: higher wages mean higher prices, and you can’t sell at higher prices than your competitors unless you offer some other benefit to paying those higher prices. That’s difficult for farms and other jobs like these. But even more important than the visible wage is that the administrative state actively discourages hiring more workers part-time instead of full-time, and hiring legal workers instead of illegal workers.

When the state actively discourages hiring illegal workers, not only do employers make the concessions necessary to hire legally, workers again show up to fill those positions.

One test of this contention came in 2006, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided six Swift & Co. meatpacking plants, arresting some 1,300 illegal immigrants. Swift responded by raising wages, offering bonuses, and recruiting more aggressively in the U.S. to staff its plants… there was a line of applicants “out the door” at Swift’s Greeley, Colorado, plant, all hoping for a chance to do one of the jobs Americans supposedly won’t do.

My mom and notsothoreau were apparently not alone in being willing to do those jobs.

Even beyond the necessity of competing against your competition, there’s the less obvious question of what an employer’s core business is. Ask employers what they love doing, and few of the lists you’ll get back will include “bullshit paperwork”. Even fewer will include “trying not to stand out from the crowd because there’s no way we’re not breaking some arcane rule we’re not even aware of”.

It is important to understand that the amount of money it costs your employer to employ you has increased sharply over the last twelve years. You just don’t see it, because most of that money goes to regulatory compliance rather than into your paycheck.

From your point of view, your pay is what goes into your bank account, or what you collect at the end of the day. From your employer’s point of view, your pay is what it costs to employ you. It includes all sorts of government mandates you don’t see. Often they will send you a pamphlet outlining the benefits you have that you don’t think about, for this reason. All of these benefits cut into your paycheck.

Worse, all of the costs to hiring and employing you also cut into your paycheck, and those aren’t even unused benefits.

Enforce the border and make it easier to hire Americans—and to spend more on raising the wages of those Americans rather than on bullshit government compliance—and Americans will do those jobs.

They will even love doing those jobs. Mike Rowe made a career out of highlighting people who love to do dirty jobs and I’d guess that notsothoreau, at least, agrees with him:

I actually loved doing orchard work. You are outside a lot and there is a seasonal rhythm. There’s a start and an end to harvest, pruning, etc. And you have lots of time to think. It’s a lot better than office work.

We’ve made it impossible for Americans to do small or part-time or inexpensive jobs, and then complain that Americans won’t do them. “Jobs Americans won’t do” are jobs Americans will do, if allowed to by Congress, bureaucratic busybodies getting out of the way, and a sane immigration policy that doesn’t cut them off at the knees.