I'm an economist by education and background.
One of the justifications for hiring illegal immigrants is that the American "worker" won't work for those wages. In my opinion, if welfare was cut off form the undeserving, they would have to go to work, and we wouldn't need the illegals.
Partly true, but the illegals' advantage is that they work mostly under-the-table, so the employer doesn't have to pay unemployment insurance, work comp insurance, payroll tax, etc. (not that legit citizens don't do that too), which brings us eventually to the "Fair Tax" that Caymen hypes, something that me and him agree on.
Somebody on welfare gets a legit job, they have to be paid at least min wage and all the taxes I mentioned above from the employer, and they lose their health benefits and their Section 8 rent goes up.
My parents lived in Ft. Myers, FL for the past several winters and have observed that virtually all the housecleaning, yard work, and construction (plus some other things) is done by Mexicans. Meantime, on the north side of town on MLK Blvd there is a soup kitchen that is lined up around the block every day with *cough* other people, who you never see mowing lawns or whatever.
Don't anybody take that wrong....I don't create the stereotypes, I just observe them.
Although labor mobility is not as flexible in the real world as economists would like, here's where welfare screws it up:
Parts of the country have large pockets of unemployed people. However, there is often not a job anywhere for them even if they wanted one. In days of old, when that happened you loaded up the car and went where there was work. See Henry Fonda in "The Grapes Of Wrath".
(This happened with large numbers of middle-class people where I live not so long ago. The red light on the horizon was not the sunset but the mass taillights of departing U-Hauls. If you have at least one relative in FL or NC, you might be a Pittsburgher, the joke goes.)
Meantime, other parts of the country are starving for workers and since nature abhors a vacuum, jobs get filled by immigrants both legal and ill
because welfare keeps people living in areas where their labor is not needed.
