Jobs Americans Won't Do Is an Argument About Wages, Not About Americans

Folks, I have discovered the most remarkable thing in the American economy. There is a class of jobs that no American will do, at any price, under any circumstances, ever. I know this because every business lobbyist in Washington says so, and they say it with a straight face, usually between lunch and a fundraiser.

Now, I am a believer in markets, so let me apply a little market logic to that claim. If nobody at all will take a job at any price, the job does not exist. It is a rumor. What the lobbyist actually means is that nobody will take it at the wage the lobbyist wants to pay. That is a very different sentence. It is also the oldest sentence in economics, and it deserves to be said out loud.

The claim, defined

Let me state the argument with the care it deserves, because it is not a stupid one.

The business case. Some work, in farming, meatpacking, construction, hospitality and elder care, is hard, seasonal, remote or unpleasant. Employers in those industries say they cannot find enough domestic workers to fill the openings, that crops will rot and rooms will go unclean, that prices will rise and that firms will close or move abroad. They say foreign labor, legal and otherwise, fills a real gap. A farmer with a ripening crop and a three-week window does not have time for a lecture on labor economics. His fruit is on the tree.

That is a real problem for real people. I do not wave it away. A grower in a hard season is not a villain, and a small business owner with an empty line on the schedule is not lying about the empty line.

What I dispute is the diagnosis. The statement "Americans won't do this work" treats a shortage as a fact about Americans. It is not. It is a fact about a price.

One: a shortage is a price, not a destiny

Here is the first premise, and it is textbook material.

When the quantity of labor an employer wants at a given wage exceeds the quantity willing to work at that wage, economists say there is a shortage at that wage. They do not say the job is impossible to fill. They say the wage is below the level at which the market would clear. Raise the wage and more people take the job. Some who had left the labor force come back, some who work elsewhere switch, some who were in school or retired reconsider. At the same time, the employer finds that he needs fewer hours of labor, because he starts looking for ways to use each hour better.

This is not a theory invented to make employers feel bad. It is how every other market works. When a restaurant cannot get enough fish at a given price, nobody concludes that the nation has "lost the capacity to eat fish." The price goes up and the supply appears. The claim that labor is an exception, that there are whole categories of work where the supply curve is vertical, is a claim that has to be proved, and it is almost never proved. It is merely asserted.

A worked example, labeled as hypothetical

Picture a vegetable farm that employs ten seasonal workers, each for 500 hours, at $15 an hour. The wage bill is 10 x 500 x $15 = $75,000. Suppose the farm cannot fill all ten jobs and decides to raise the wage by 20 percent, to $18. The new wage bill for ten workers is 10 x 500 x $18 = $90,000, an increase of $15,000. If labor is a quarter of the farm's total costs, which I have simply assumed for the example, then total costs rise by 20 percent of that quarter, or 5 percent. That is a real number, and a farmer would feel it. It is also a long way from "the crop rots in the field," and it is a cost the farm can recover in prices, in efficiency, or in a combination of both.

None of those figures is a statistic about any real farm. The point is the shape of the arithmetic: a large wage increase for workers can be a small percentage increase in the cost of the product, which is why the claim of ruin deserves skepticism whenever it is made.

Two: the H-2A program already admits the premise

Now the awkward bit for the business argument, which is that federal law has conceded the point for decades.

The H-2A program lets agricultural employers bring in foreign workers for temporary or seasonal jobs when they cannot find enough qualified and available U.S. workers. It is not capped at an annual number. And here is what Congress and the Department of Labor built into it: a requirement that the employer pay at least the adverse effect wage rate. That rate is set by the government so that bringing in foreign workers does not depress the wages of American workers doing similar work. The program also requires employers to recruit American workers first, to provide housing in many cases and to offer certain guarantees on hours.

Read that again, slowly. The law says that the presence of foreign labor can pull down the wages of Americans, and it sets a floor to prevent that. The adverse effect wage rate is, in other words, an official acknowledgment that wages and labor supply are connected. If wages did not move with the supply of workers, there would be no "adverse effect" to guard against. The regulation concedes the economics the business argument denies.

I will also point out, because I like consistency, that the program is itself a market intervention that the industry wants and defends. An employer who values the free market has a funny way of expressing it when he asks the government to import his labor and then complains that the government sets the wage. The adverse effect wage rate is a sticking point for many growers, and the methodology for setting it has been revised and argued over for years. That is a fight worth following, and you can read the rule on the Department of Labor's site. Whatever the arguments over the formula, the existence of the rate shows that Congress knew where the pressure points were.

Three: the men who are not working

Here is the point that should bother the people who say "Americans won't do it."

Over the last half century, the share of prime-age men, those between roughly twenty-five and fifty-four, who are working or looking for work has fallen. The Council of Economic Advisers published a report in 2016 on the long-term decline in prime-age male labor force participation, and it documented a decline that began decades earlier and was not explained by the business cycle alone. These are men in the years when they should be building a career and a family. A significant number are not in school, not working and not looking.

Why? The causes are many and contested: changes in the economy, the decline of some industries, disability programs, the criminal-justice system, family structure, the opioid epidemic. I am not going to pretend that a wage increase for crop pickers solves all of that. It does not.

What I will say is that "Americans won't do this work" is a sentence that looks very different when you notice how many working-age Americans are on the sidelines. If there are millions of capable adults not in the labor force, the question is what it would take to bring some of them in, and the first answer an economist gives is: a better offer. A higher wage, better conditions, steadier hours and a path to something better. Cheap imported labor makes that offer unnecessary. That is the point of it.

This is not a claim that the jobs are easy, or that every unemployed person can move to a farm. It is a claim that a country that has an enormous pool of potential workers and a business class that says it cannot find any is a country in which somebody has not tried hard enough, or has not been willing to pay enough. Which brings us to the second thing that happens when labor is not cheap.

Four: when labor costs more, machines get built

The best evidence against the "no one will do it" claim is what has happened every time the supply of cheap labor has been cut off. Employers do not close their doors. They invest.

Consider the history of American agriculture. The mechanical cotton picker, commercially developed in the 1940s, displaced a huge amount of hand labor in the South. The mechanical harvesting of many crops followed. When Congress ended the Bracero guest-worker program in 1964, growers who had warned of ruin turned to machines, and the story of the tomato harvester, which I tell in full in When the Bracero Program Ended, California Built a Tomato Harvester, is the clearest example. Output did not collapse. The industry mechanized and grew.

The pattern is general. A rising wage raises the return on a labor-saving machine. When labor is cheap and plentiful, the machine does not pay for itself, and nobody builds it. When labor gets expensive, the machine does pay, and somebody builds it. That is how a wage becomes a technology. It is also how workers in the end earn more: each hour of labor is worth more when it is working with better equipment.

That is a dynamic argument, and it is the one the business lobby never mentions. Cheap labor is not free. Its cost is the machine that was never invented, the efficiency that was never gained and the wage that never rose.

Five: the dignity of work

Now let me turn to the moral part, because this is a debate about more than money.

The phrase "jobs Americans won't do" carries an insult inside it. It says there is a class of work too lowly for Americans and that a different class of people exists to do it. I reject that, and so, I think, does every serious moral tradition we have. The Book of Colossians says to do your work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men. In that tradition, work is not a punishment sorted by social rank; it is a calling in which every honest task has dignity, whether it is building a house, picking a crop or cleaning a hospital.

If that is so, then the way to honor the dignity of difficult work is to pay for it. A society that says harvesting, roofing, meatpacking and elder care are "jobs Americans won't do" has decided that the work is beneath its own people, and it has decided, in effect, that those who do it can be paid accordingly. A society that says those jobs are honest, necessary and worth a living wage is a society that respects the people who do them.

Some of the most compelling labor leaders in American history understood this. They did not ask for cheap newcomers to take the work that Americans left. They asked for better wages and enforced rules, and they opposed hiring practices that undercut their members. The story of one of them is in Cesar Chavez Fought Illegal Hiring, a Part of His Story Rarely Told. Compare the claim here with the arguments in Two Economists, One Boatlift, and the Fight Over Immigration and Wages, which look at the evidence on what immigration does to wages.

The strongest objection, answered

An honest reader should push back at this point, so let me do it for you.

"This sounds good on paper. But there are places where a higher wage will not summon workers who live a thousand miles away. Seasonal work in a remote county is not going to be filled by an unemployed man in a city. And mechanization is not available for every crop or every task. A raspberry is not a tomato. Elder care cannot be automated. You are asking small businesses to absorb costs that big ones can pass on."

That is a strong objection, and the answer has three parts.

First, it is a reason to design a good legal program, not to tolerate an unlawful one. If there are genuine seasonal gaps, a lawful, capped, transparent guest-worker system that pays a real wage and does not undercut Americans is a reasonable answer, and a conservative can support one. The H-2A program exists for exactly that. The argument is not against the legal program. It is against using the existence of a hard job to justify the illegal hiring that undercuts everyone who plays by the rules, including the farmer who pays properly. See The Employer Who Hires Off the Books Is Breaking the Law, Not Helping.

Second, mobility responds to price too. A higher wage and good housing pull workers across states, as they have in oil fields, in harvest crews and in construction. Workers have always moved toward a better offer. A seasonal job that pays well enough travels.

Third, the claim that small employers cannot compete is exactly why the rules must be enforced evenly. The farmer who hires off the books has a cost advantage over the one who does not. That is not a level field. A system that punishes honesty and rewards cheating is not protecting small business; it is subsidizing the cheater.

What a conservative reform looks like

If you take this seriously, you do not end up with "no foreign workers." You end up with a few concrete principles.

1. Enforce the rules on hiring evenly, so that no employer gains by breaking them. That is the lesson of the 1986 law and of the debate over verification, which you can read in The Conservative Split Over Mandatory E-Verify, Argued From Both Sides.
2. Keep a lawful temporary-worker option for genuine seasonal needs, with a wage floor that protects American workers.
3. Let wages adjust, and do not treat a price below the market-clearing wage as a permanent fact of nature.
4. Invest in productivity, including machines and training, which is where long-run wage growth comes from.
5. Bring more of the working-age population in, through work requirements, job training and a culture that honors manual and skilled labor.

None of that is hostile to anyone. It is a program built on the idea that a country's workers are its first resource and that an honest wage is the best immigration policy for the people who are already here.

The case in brief

1. "Jobs Americans won't do" really means jobs Americans won't do at the wage offered, and a shortage at a given wage is a price signal, not a fact of nature.
2. The H-2A program's adverse effect wage rate concedes in law that foreign labor can depress American wages, which is the economics the business argument denies.
3. The long decline in prime-age male labor force participation shows a large pool of potential workers who would respond to better offers.
4. When cheap labor is cut off, employers invest in machines, as the end of the Bracero program in 1964 and the tomato harvester showed, and that investment is where lasting wage growth comes from.
5. Honest work has dignity, and the way to honor it is to pay for it, enforce the hiring rules evenly and keep a lawful, wage-protected option for real seasonal needs.

What you can do: look up the current H-2A adverse effect wage rate for your state on the Department of Labor's website, and ask local employers and your representative, through the my-representatives page, how they would raise wages and enforce hiring rules together.