[jmpman]

What about the poor people in the US, whose hourly rate is lower because of the flow of illegal immigrants? Aren’t the poor in the US disproportionately minority?

Yes, there is a downside of having a large “talent” pool of unskilled labor. If you’re a high school dropout, US citizen, you’re competing with this “talent” for handyman jobs, landscaping, house cleaning, etc.

Sure, it’s great to have cheap landscaping, but before you dismantle ICE, go speak with a US citizen who’s doing roofing, and ask if their income would be higher without the illegal immigrants.

[Jtsummers]

Blame the employers who choose to hire illegal immigrants, then. If they weren't breaking the law by hiring them, then there'd be greatly reduced motivation to travel here and work illegally (versus attempting to come in legally).

[Cuuugi]

Why can't you blame both? Both are "technically" breaking the law?

[Jtsummers]

Sure, you can blame them both. Like many things multiple parties are responsible for the issue. But one group, in this case, is tacitly (and sometimes explicitly) inviting the other into the US to participate in the illegal job market. So, at least from my perspective, that puts a larger portion of the blame on the employers. They're also (along with enforcement agencies, again focusing on the employers) the only ones in a position to meaningful reduce the illegal job market.

Actually fine these businesses, threaten them with being shutdown and actually shut the worst offenders down. They're probably in violation of quite a few labor and tax laws as well, beyond just the issue of who they hire.

[geofft]

There's a couple of answers here. The big one is that if you're here illegally, you already know you have limited (though not zero!) recourse to the law, so you're willing to take illegal jobs - jobs that pay below minimum wage, jobs that are cheaper for the employer because safety standards are being ignored, etc. Immigration law is one way in which the law regulates the labor market; labor law itself is also part of it, and if we're going to talk about upholding the law, let's take both into account. If we were to include significantly more migrant workers under legal immigration, they would have effective access to the protections of labor law, which means they have less room to undercut US citizens.

They'd also have more access to jobs that tend to effectively require work authorization. You can pay a fellow in cash to work on your roof without going through E-Verify; you can't quite easily pay a fellow in cash to work at a major fast food chain or drive a school bus or be an SRE at a thousand-person tech firm or whatever. So increasing legal immigration may have the effect of reducing the labor supply for house and farm work.

More generally, the economy is a complex thing, and each change you make has many effects. The wage for roofers is determined by both supply (number of potential roofers) and demand - if more people live here, there are quite literally more roofs. While I'm not saying this by itself is likely to save the roofing-labor market, I do think that there are likely broader effects from increasing our pool of legal immigrants besides the most obvious one of depressing wages, and we should look at more than just the extremely short term.

And in the long term, if population growth keeps up, the pool of unskilled labor with domestic work authorization is going to go up on its own. If our economy/society can't handle that, we should be figuring out how to address that anyway.

(This is all a bit orthogonal to dismantling ICE - I do agree that having an underclass of laborers without equal protection under the laws is bad for everyone. I just don't think that ICE is a morally justifiable solution to that problem. We should create more "proper pathways" for people to become documented residents and authorized workers, but until we do so, I don't think having ICE around makes things better.)