For years, Americans have complained about “stolen” jobs. Some gripe about excessive outsourcing to countries such as India; others complain that illegal immigrants from Latin America are competing unfairly against American workers by ignoring minimum wage laws. Very few people seem to appreciate the benefits of cheap labor, despite the fact that lower production costs translate directly into lower prices for consumers.

If Americans were truly losing their jobs due to foreign or illegally imported competition, then there might be cause for concern. However, the unemployment rate is currently hovering at 4.6% for the month of September, down from 5.1% in 2005. This number clearly indicates that almost all of the Americans who want a job have one. In fact, if the unemployment rate goes much lower, inflation rates are likely to increase. Illegal immigrants and foreigners don’t seem to be doing a very good job of putting Americans out of work, do they?

As things stand now, Americans can have their cake and eat it too (just remember…the cake’s not free). Minimum wage laws guarantee that Americans who have jobs make an ostensibly decent amount of money, while the presence of illegal immigrants and foreign workers allows us to also reap the many benefits of cheap labor. Since almost every American who wants a job has a job, it seems that things are working out quite nicely for legal residents of the USA.

Why, then, is America so concerned about illegal immigration? Numbers don’t lie, but they also don’t pack much emotional punch; people will respond more intensely to the news story about the hard-working American who lost his job to a foreigner than they will to the dry analyst who rattles off this month’s unemployment data without betraying so much as a flicker of emotion. Perhaps this concern also has something to do with the combative, self-righteous, better-than-everyone-else attitude that America has adopted toward the rest of the world. But that’s just idle speculation.