I disagree. The fact that they cannot legally work and therefore must work for less gives millions of LEGAL citizens less money to legally spend. The entire basis of your “jobs Americans wont do” argument is that Americans are lazy. Your fundamental assumption is false. Your extrapolations based on that assumption must therefore also be false.
It's false, but nobody is saying that it is because Americans are lazy. It is that we have more jobs than people available to fill them. There's also nothing particularly wrong with that. Also, it's healthier from an economic standpoint that those unfilled jobs are toward the bottom of the wage scale. Millions of unfilled jobs at the *top* of the wage scale would be a far more serious problem.
Maybe in your family. My children worked hard jobs AND went to college. Tired of the lazy American children mantra.
The argument that immigrants (particularly the illegal ones) are doing jobs that Americans won’t do it ludicrous. Even with our huge illegal alien problem, there are still regions of the country where few such aliens reside. So who does those jobs in those regions? Americans, that’s who.
If an area doesn’t have any illegals hanging around, does it mean they have no construction or landscaping work being performed there? No farming or mining? No factories?
Can any of the illegal alien supporters point us to a region of the country that is economically dying for lack of illegal alien labor?
When Ted Kennedy, George Bush, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal tell us that aliens are doing jobs Americans won’t do, what they really mean is that aliens are doing those jobs at pay scales lower than Americans would tolerate, without any worker protections, etc. Send the illegal aliens home and those jobs will still be done, it’ll just require the employer to pay out First World wages rather than Third World wages.
Oh, and Dianne Feinstein would have to pay her gardener and limo driver a living wage.