What's the Harm? (Part II)

Economically, illegal aliens are Karl Marx's "reserve army of the unemployed."
Yes, Karl Marx, the person whose name is synonymous with communism. His critique of industrial capitalism was that it relies on huge numbers of unemployed people to keep wages low. If the workers go out on strike in demand for higher wages, the employers can just fire them and replace them with people from the reserve pool of unemployed individuals desperate for work.

New York is a place with a lot of illegal immigrants. Mayor Bloomberg estimated 500,000 at a U.S. Senate hearing on July 5, 2006.

The thing is, their is a drastic oversupply of low and unskilled labor in New York City.

"Several thousands of people - mostly young, black and Hispanic – had shown up to apply for fewer than 200 positions, only 65 of them full-time jobs." Interviewed while standing on line, Michel Ernest, 47, of Brooklyn, said, "I want any kind of job. I'll work in the kitchen if they have a kitchen." A bystander said, "This is what unemployment looks like in New York City. I wanted to cry."

(Anthony Ramirez, “A Job Prospect Lures, Then Frustrates, Thousands,” New York Times, 4 November 2006).

Illegal immigration how the employer class keeps wages low. Bush claims there would be a labor shortage without illegal immigration, but that is largely not true and one thing that would really happen is a mild redisribution of wealth away from the rich. There would be "inflation" at first due to "rising labor costs" but that would really be about employers complaining that they have to pay workers a living wage.
There would be all kinds of newspaper headlines, "Inflation Is Due to Rising Labor Costs!" All kinds of handwringing and blameslinging about "Rising Labor Costs." But "Rising Labor Costs" would actually be an indicator that WORKERS ARE WINNING BACK A BIGGER SHARE OF THE ECONOMIC PIE. The inflation will be a mirage-- once the rich start giving back some of their multimillion $$ bonuses, we'll see that it is not inflation, but a redistribution of wealth.

Warren Buffet recently said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” (Ben Stein, “In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning,” New York Times, 26 November 2006.) Illegal immigration has created an oversupply of labor so that wage rates remain low and workers must be docile or risk being replaced. Illegal immigration serves the same function as Marx’s reserve army of the unemployed. The indignities and the extreme difficulty of avoiding poverty that Barbara Ehrenreich described in Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (2002) would not be possible without the oversupply of labor. (See: Greenhouse, Steven and Leonhardt, David, “Real Wages Fail to Match Growth in Productivity,” New York Times, 8/28/2006.)