Why Aren’t Americans Taking The Dirty Jobs In Alabama?

Back to Alabama for the moment, because I read something that I hadn’t seen regarding the issue of work and immigrants and that state’s economy. I came across an article in Bloomberg Businessweek titled: Why Americans Won’t Do Dirty Jobs. It was the first word in the title that grabbed my attention. Why.

We’ve read, and NewsTaco has reported, extensively about the politics, and the racism, and the consequences of it all. But I had seen nothing, coming from traditional, establishment media that tackled the “why” of this particular, unexpected issue. The idea in Alabama – as it was in Arizona, and Georgia and in all the other states that piled on the anti-immigrant law bandwagon – was that immigrants were taking jobs from American workers and that, especially in this economy. And if you eliminated those immigrants, the jobs would be filled by eager American workers. 

What we found, what many of us knew would happen, is that unemployed American workers didn’t jump at the chance to take the jobs the anti-immigrant laws provided. Crops in Georgia, Arizona and Alabama have gone unharvested, rotting in the fields, growing not jobs, but debt for farmers and the agriculture sectors in those states.

So why is this happening? According to Bloomberg, it’s basic economics:

These are difficult, dirty, exhausting jobs that, for previous generations, were the first rickety step on the ladder to prosperity. They still are—just not for Americans.

The first rickety step on the ladder to prosperity. The idea implies a sacrifice that must be lived in order to be understood – it’s part of the immigrant experience, to take a job that for all of its dirty, exhausting, and rickety-ness is still better than the job they had back home. It’s also a matter of attitude and vision: where an American worker might see exhausting-for-minimum-wage, an immigrant sees a future. It’s a perspective that sees the first rickety rung as a place to grasp, and maybe fix with a few nails in the right places.

That’s why Americans aren’t taking those jobs. But it’s not new.

In Alabama, some 211,000 people are out of work. In rural Perry County…the unemployment rate is 18.2 percent, twice the national average. One of the big selling points of the immigration law was that it would free up jobs that Republican Governor Robert Bentley said immigrants had stolen from recession-battered Americans. Yet native Alabamians have not come running to fill these newly liberated positions. Many employers think the law is ludicrous and fought to stop it. Immigrants aren’t stealing anything from anyone, they say. Businesses turned to foreign labor only because they couldn’t find enough Americans to take the work they were offering.

American workers were not going to take those back-breaking jobs because they had never taken them before. Why would a law change that truth?

Maybe that’s the question they should be asking.