Direct job displacement of domestic, native-born, workers by immigration has been steadily increasing in developed countries open to mass immigration. In Australia, for example, from 2008 to 2016, the Australian labour market increased by 474,000 full-time jobs but only 74,000 of them (just 16%, or fewer than one in six) were taken by the Australian-born. The other 400,000 can be considered as jobs stolen from Australian workers.
Low or unskilled immigration is primarily about providing cheap labour for employers (especially those in labour-intensive industries) thus generating higher profits through lowering wage costs and increasing market share through selling more and cheaper products.
Employers warmly embrace foreign workers because of the opportunity for labour cost savings through wage underpayment, especially for low-skilled jobs. This includes directly paying the immigrant worker less than the legally mandated wage, and, in economic sectors with large percentages of immigrant workers, wages are depressed (and working conditions degraded) throughout the sector through the indirect effects of cheap labour competition, forcing honest, legally-compliant or relatively generous employers to get tough on wages to remain competitive with businsses reducing their costs through wage lowering. Empirical support for this wage-depression effect of mass immigration comes from the impeccably orthodox US National Academy of Sciences which did a meta-data review of 22 relevant studies and found that 18 of them concluded that mass immigration depresses ages by inflating the size of the labour force.
Employers of more skilled labour also benefit financially from worker immigration through the avoidance of domestic training costs in favour of a steady supply of off-the-shelf skilled foreign workers.
Union organisation and penetration are also weakened by immigrant replacement workers who are generally harder to organise because they are prepared to work for reduced wages and conditions in return for simply having a job, especially if they are illegal immigrants. Poorer union presence in a workplace generally results in poorer wages and working conditions.
Cheap labour immigration is a racket which not only directly steals jobs from the native working class and drives down their living standards through competitive wage-lowering but it is also a scheme which the taxpaying public effectively subsidises through stumping up for the costs of migrants’ education, health, welfare and crime and policing.
The detrimental labour market, and taxpayer, outcomes could be addressed politically by a policy of ending mass legal immigration , and through beefed-up enforcement of laws against illegal immigration such as cracking down on migrants’ overstaying temporary work visas, violations of the ‘no work’ conditions attached to their visitor visas, treating with extreme scpticism the bogus ‘refugee’ protection scam, etc.