Give us you poor, tired, huddled masses yearning to work for below minimum wage...

I realize that immigration has helped the United States become a great nation. And aside from the Native Americans we are all either immigrants or descendants of immigrants. My ancestors immigrated here at the turn of the century. Three sets of my great-grandparents and one grandparent came to the United States for opportunities that where not available in their own country.

But today, as more and more manufacturing jobs are sent overseas, and many service jobs are being off-shored opportunities for potential new Americans are drying up. Today the main goal of immigration ( and perhaps it was always its main goal ) is to keep labor costs down.
It all boils down to simple supply and demand. As long as there is an excess labor supply, employers can keep labor costs down because there will always be many people competing for the same position. As soon as competition drops and the demand for labor increases, employers will keep having to pay higher and higher wages. This will take more money out of the pocket of the few wealthy employers and spread it around to the many downtrodden workers.

This is why they cannot close the Mexican border. If the border is closed they will have to find Americans to do the jobs nobody wants to and ::gasp:: pay them at least minimum wage, maybe even higher where this is a real shortage of workers for less desirable jobs.

This is also why in the North American Free Trade Agreement Bill (NAFTA) there is a provision for special work VISAs, TN VISAs, for many professional jobs for people from Canada and Mexico. Professions included in this provision include just about all medical professions, scientists, university professors, architects, accountants and librarians. By making it easy for professionals from other countries to immigrate here this provision has also been helping to keep supply high and labor costs down. [Authors note: Actually for the medical profession it is beneficial to the middle class if we can import as many professionals as possible, since we seem to have not chance at getting social medicine anytime soon, and health insurance costs increase much more quickly than other living expenses. Many more doctors would mean more competition and this should drive medical costs down. Doctors won't let this happen because they count themselves among the elite upper class and it is probably why medical costs increase so quickly because they want to keep up with the wealthy Joneses.]

I have seen many articles in the past describing Japan's great concern over their shrinking and aging population. I would think that this would be regarded as a blessing to a nation that has traditionally been overpopulated. So overpopulated that in World War II they started to try to forcably aquire land from mainland China, as well as other locations in the Pacific, remember Pearl Harbor?

What the articles fail to report is that one of the main reasons they are afraid of the shrinking population is that the demand for workers will far out weigh the supply which will drive labor costs sky high, and might even require them to open their borders to foreigners.
The bottom line is immigration's main purpose appears to be to keep labor costs down, and until Americans understand this is not always a good thing, our borders will always remain opened.