Immigration & Labor
Our Labor Problems Have Been Decades in the Making
We’ve painted ourselves into a corner. For decades, parents and teachers have been pounding the idea into young, impressionable minds that everyone has to go to college, that everyone needs a college education in today’s world. This is simply not true. Less than a third of the jobs in the United States require some form of higher education.
Instead of inspiring more kids to pursue college, we’ve succeeded in creating a generation of young people who are ashamed to take a job where they work with their hands. We’ve managed to create a situation where jobs have to be outsourced to counties halfway across the world because no one is willing to do the work in our own country. What we’ve succeeded in doing is creating a shortage of workers in the construction, restaurant, and hotel industry, among others. Since these jobs can’t be outsourced, the workers come across our boarders, legally or illegally, to do the hands-on work that we’ve conditioned our sons and daughters to avoid like the plague. Then we wonder why we have an immigration problem. It’s our own doing.
I’m not the first person to make this observation. This rising problem has been talked about for years. Attracting workers into the construction industry has nothing to do with wages. Construction industry jobs are some of the highest paying hourly jobs in the country. Even the local McDonalds has an almost-perpetual sign in the window seeking employees with a starting pay several dollars higher than the minimum wage. Not bad pay for being able to mumble, “You want fries with that?”
It’s not the lack of pay that’s turning young people away from the construction industry, rather it’s the shame our educational system has conditioned them to feel for performing physical labor. You think I’m exaggerating? In recent years, many high schools have cut back or eliminated funding for wood shop, metal shop, and auto mechanic classes. Many say it’s to save money, but most are openly honest and say it was not the right message they want to send to our youth. The message they want to send is to study hard and go to college. Apparently getting dirt under your fingernails in no longer considered a noble profession.
This trend needs to be reversed. Educators have to look at the real world and admit to themselves that many students aren’t going to college and about two-thirds of all jobs available don’t require a college education. They should be addressing the needs of all their students, not just the ones they deem fit for college.
Unfortunately, our education system continues to convey the message that not going to college implies failure. The only long-term solution to both this labor and immigration problem may be to change the way educators think, and I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for it to happen.
So, high school graduates look upon any job that doesn’t include a desk, secretary, and expense account in distain while labor-intensive jobs go unfulfilled. At the same time, legal and illegal immigrants march across our borders and happily fill these same manual labor positions for higher hourly wages than many of them used to earn in a day. Do we have an immigration problem? Yes, but on a larger, long-term scale we have an education problem spawned by our school system that is out of touch with reality.
Marc Dodson
Editor
