Want to “Steal Back” a Job Now Held by an Immigrant Worker?

Greetings, American friends,

Do you hanker for a job putting roofs on houses in the hot summer sun, or cutting up carcasses (and your fingers) in a frigid meat or poultry packing plant, or doing manual labor on construction sites and roads in all kinds of weather, or cooking, bussing tables, and washing dishes in a restaurant, or cleaning toilets and making beds in a hotel, or harvesting apples, strawberries, asparagus, and hundreds of other crops that require exhausting stoop labor, or cleaning office buildings at night, or taking care of affluent people’s kids while they go to work, or mowing lawns and trimming foliage for homes and businesses?

If so, you can probably find an employer who will be happy to hire you—after all, you at least speak English—and you can thereby strike back at Jose and Esmeralda by “stealing” a job from an immigrant worker, maybe even an “illegal alien.”

Let me know how it goes for you, amigos. The world really is your oyster, you know.

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Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute and Editor at Large of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and he has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University, the University of Economics, Prague, and George Mason University. He has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and Stanford University, and a fellow at the Hoover Institution and the National Science Foundation.