As nationalistic fervor gets whipped up in backwaters across the country, we’ve seen the return of the “jobs that Americans won’t do” trope. Not only is this patently false, as there are plenty of citizens currently working terrible, disgusting jobs everywhere, but it relies on a false sense of how labor markets are actually constructed.
Without reaching for Hanson and Pratt’s Gender, Work and Space, it’s easy to see that between familial and friendship ties that lead to vouching in workplaces and the newspaper and internet ads meant to reach certain groups of people, you can see that labor pools don’t comprise the society as a whole each time a job becomes available. In fact, as most people learn from experience, some jobs are never actually available publicly at all, a fact that applies up and down the life chance spectrum.
This is a major factor in segregated workplaces and the animating concern for gendered and raced jobs, regardless of nationality. That said, it’s very embarrassing that the Senate voted for the fence, which is simply the most expensive, reactionary approach to immigration reform I can imagine.
Conversely, it’s an apt image for what’s been happening in immigration policy for quite some time, both at home through outsourcing and other threats and abroad through multi-lateral free trade agreements, two forces that have combined historically to produce labor unrest.