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The book ‘‘They Take Our Jobs!’: And 20 Other Myths about Immigration’ written by Aviva Chomsky highlights the widespread myths and beliefs about immigration and immigrants. Throughout the book, Chomsky challenges the biased assumptions that increase the misinformed claims about immigrants, radically altering the notions of citizenship, stereotypes, the law, discrimination, and US history. As she quotes, “Immigrants are blamed for a host of social ills and compared unfavorably to generations of immigrants…a lot of our assumptions and opinions about immigration today are based on a set of beliefs about this country’s past. These beliefs are formed by our social studies and history classes…” (pg.12). Chomsky hopes to create a possible idea about what a humane immigration policy would look like and how creating a humane immigration policy that would connect to other changes at a national and global level. In this essay, I will focus on one, but to me, the most important of the myths she describes, that immigrants are taking American jobs.
As Chomsky emphasizes in her book, there are two fallacies that indicate and prove that there are multiple reasons that immigrants are not the only reason to blame for many Americans not being able to have many job opportunities. In the first fallacy, she emphasizes that the concept of ‘American’ jobs is not the correct term to use and that many people wrongly use it because in today’s society you cannot just indicate or assume it to be one national identity. The second fallacy indicates the notion that immigration and immigrants reduce the number of jobs available to people already in the US. Furthermore, Chomsky writes that by maintaining and exploiting global inequalities, the US economic system has managed to create a high profit/cheap product model. Many industries tend to employ the poorest and most vulnerable people to seek a reduction in costs. These industries went to the extent to move to different parts of the world where there is an increase in poverty and inequality, which creates a vulnerable labor force, which did not support policies and laws in the US, such as immigration policies. For example, the New England textile industry was one of the first to try to move and relocate plants, which led to a shift of their production to the United States. The reason why New England started doing this was because they wanted to decrease their costs. Suddenly after what New England did, at the end of the twentieth century, many businesses had spread to all industries. Even the United States started to do this later in the mid-twentieth century, and their reason was that they also wanted to find cheaper workers and labor abroad. This led to Puerto Rico’s program ‘Operation Bootstrap’, which helped US businesses to transfer the most labor-intensive portions of their operations to the island. This program appeared because the United States wanted to regulate law wages and a high-profit system that was locally inside of the United States and reached by factory workers. When it comes to the increase of immigrants reducing the number of jobs available, according to Chomsky, there is simply no valid correlation between the increase of immigrants and unemployment. In fact, during the Great Depression in the 1930s, when unemployment was at its all-time over 20%, immigration was also at one of its lowest points in our nation’s history.
Despite all the evidence Aviva Chomsky presents in his book, the myth that immigrants are taking American jobs is invalid. American society needs to be more aware and finally get rid of prejudice against immigrants.
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