Win or lose on Tuesday, Sen. J.D. Vance’s (R-OH) willingness to engage in contentious in-depth policy discussions, and the skill with which he has explained the conservative position, has been a public service.
There was no finer example of Vance’s effective debating than his exchange with New York Times podcaster Lulu Garcia-Navarro on the economic impact of illegal immigration.
First noting that President Donald Trump promised to deport millions of illegal immigrants, Garcia-Navarro turned to the issue of housing prices, an area of rare bipartisan agreement in the election, and pressed Vance on how Trump could possibly decrease housing prices while also deporting illegal immigrants since a third of all construction workers are Hispanic and, in Garcia-Navarro’s words, “of those, a large proportion are undocumented.”
Vance answered with crushing irony, “Well, I think it’s a fair question because we know that back in the 1960s, when we had very low levels of illegal immigration, Americans didn’t build houses.”
After a brief smile, he continued, “But, of course they did. And I’m being sarcastic in service of a point, Lulu, the assumption that because a large number of homebuilders now are using undocumented labor, that that’s the only way to build homes, I think again betrays a fundamental —”
But then Garcia-Navarro cut Vance off, noting that “the country is much bigger. The need is much bigger.” She then asked, “How would you deal with the knock-on effect of your proposal to remove millions of people who work in a critical part of the economy?”
Vance responded by noting that there are more than 7 million “prime-age men,” or those between the ages of 25 and 54, who have dropped out of the labor force, and that employers could reengage them.
An indignant Garcia-Navarro again cut off Vance, noting that the unemployment rate was only 4.1%, and she asserted that those not in the labor force, “They’re in the military, they’re parents, they’re sick, they’re old. They might not want to work in construction.”
Vance was having none of it.
“The unemployment rate does not count labor-force participation dropouts,” he said. “And again, this is one of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society is it gets us in a mindset of saying we can only build houses with illegal immigrants, when we have 7 million, just men, not even women, just men, who have completely dropped out of the labor force. People say, well, Americans won’t do those jobs. Americans won’t do those jobs for below-the-table wages. They won’t do those jobs for nonliving wages. But people will do those jobs. They will just do those jobs at certain wages.”
“Think about the perspective of an American company,” Vance continued. “I want them to go searching in their own country for their own citizens, sometimes people who may be struggling with addiction or trauma, get them reengaged in American society. We cannot have an entire American business community that is giving up on American workers and then importing millions of illegal laborers.”
Vance is right. Let’s step back and look at some numbers. The overall labor force participation rate has fallen from 67.2% in 2001 to 62.6% today. That decrease has been caused mostly by the population aging. The participation of “prime-age” people peaked at 84.6% in 1999 and has fallen only slightly, to 84% today. That 0.6 percentage points does not equal 7 million missing men.
The overall rise in prime-age labor force participation, however, hides some interesting trends. Since the 1950s the percentage of women participating in the workforce has risen rapidly while the percentage of men working has fallen. In 1958, 97.8% of prime-age men were in the labor force. Today the number has fallen to 89.5%, almost 10 percentage points lower. That is where Vance gets his 7 million missing men from the labor force number.
This decline in participation is not spread equally. Those with a college degree are much more likely to be in the labor force than those who didn’t go to college. This decline in low-skilled male labor force participation mirrors a story in wages.
Wages for all American workers have risen since the 1950s. But the gains have been concentrated among women and college-educated men. Wages for all women are up from the 1950s, as are wages for college-educated men. But for low-skill men, they have fallen, and that is who has left the labor force.
Not so coincidentally, illegal immigrants have much the same skill profile as those who have left the labor force. According to the Migration Policy Institute, approximately 69% of adult illegal immigrants have no education beyond high school. These are the workers who are being paid under the table by employers, undercutting the wages of native-born workers who, as a result, leave the workforce and live on welfare and who all too often turn to drugs to fill their lives instead of doing useful work and building a family.
Illegal immigration isn’t economically bad for everyone. Many educated workers benefit greatly from it. College-educated men and women benefit from lower costs for food, cleaning, healthcare, and sometimes even housing because low-skill, low-pay illegal immigrants are working in those sectors.
That doesn’t mean low-skilled immigration costs nothing. Illegal immigration undercuts the wages of native workers — by some estimates by as much as $50 billion a year. The children of illegal immigrants crowd schools, make teaching native English speakers harder, and make wait times for emergency healthcare longer because they have no insurance — but hospitals must serve them anyway, thus driving healthcare costs back up for everyone else.
Rising labor costs are not the main driver of high house prices. California has a mass of illegal immigrant labor, yet it suffers the highest housing costs in the nation. The real drivers of housing costs are local permitting regulations and restrictive state and national environmental laws. At the national level, any housing development that requires federal agency activity, such as the issue of a Clean Water Act permit, requires a costly and time-consuming National Environmental Policy Act review. State laws such as California’s Environmental Quality Act also create opportunities for activists to delay and kill housing developments in state court.
This all leaves an overarching question about what type of society we want to live in. Do we want to live in a country where a subset of employers get rich by paying illegal immigrants less than they would have to pay Americans? Do we want taxpayers to foot the cost of Medicaid, food stamps, housing, and healthcare for those illegal immigrants and their children?
Or do we, rather, want to live in a society in which employers must, as Vance put it, reengage with citizens, help them get the skills and treatment they need to be productive, and pay them a living wage? Under this second scenario, there would be less need for welfare, food stamps, and housing subsidies as those least fortunate among us would now be much more likely to have a job.
As powerful as Garcia-Navarro made Trump sound, he will not be able to snap his fingers and make every illegal immigrant disappear. In the right setting (not a rally) Trump admits as much. For example, in an interview with Time, he said no new camps would be necessary to process illegal immigrants, and his policy response would be to shut down the flow of new migrants across the border. Then, slowly he would deport those already here, starting with those in trouble with law enforcement. This would include not just murderers and rapists but also those charged with shoplifting and drunken driving. Just removing these criminal migrants would be a huge improvement over the current policy of letting them roam free, but it would also take time.
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In that time, as Trump also cracked down on employers who hired illegal immigrants, businesses would find ways to reengage the 7 million prime-age men no longer in the workforce.
We need those men working again. More importantly, for their own sake, they need to be working again, too. It can be accomplished. We just need the political will to enforce our existing immigration laws.