Shock Finding: Americans Will ‘Do the Jobs Americans Won’t Do’ If You Pay Them a Fair Wage

At base, a “fair” wage is one that will attract people to do what you need them to do. 

It isn’t $20, $30, $40, or $1, $3, or $10 an hour. It is the wage at which people think they are better off taking than not. There is no non-artificial minimum wage, and no absolute limit to the size of the wage either. The way wages should be set is through market mechanisms. 

Here in the United States, we even have an implicit minimum wage on top of the ones set by law: people have an alternative called the welfare state, along with various types of public and nonprofit support that enable individuals to live on what amounts to a basic income. Advocates of a so-called “Universal Basic Income” seem not to notice that we have something that amounts to that already, although it doesn’t go out to everybody. In the US, you have to work hard at ruining your life to wind up homeless and hungry.

That’s why the whole “immigrants do the jobs Americans won’t do” argument is ridiculous, and Trump’s mass deportations are proving that right before our eyes. 

A meatpacker in Nebraska has developed a “novel pitch” to attract more American workers: competitive pay, predictable shift scheduling, and better workplace ergonomics. pic.twitter.com/GW4Y1Nbzt8

— Daniel Kishi (@DanielMKishi) June 23, 2025

The Journal looked into how industries that have (illegally) relied on illegal aliens to do the work are adjusting to the new reality, and they have discovered something that any economist could have told them: Americans will do these jobs if you pay them better. 

People will do things if they believe that doing them will leave them better off than before. Illegal aliens are leaving poor, poorly run countries. As Trump would say, “Sh**hole countries,” so working at even low wages in the United States will make them better off than remaining at home. They are willing to be cheap labor here because the alternative is worse. 

The same isn’t true for many Americans, so they pass over these jobs. For many, even being unemployed is a better alternative to doing backbreaking work in poor conditions for low pay, so they won’t do the jobs. 

But make it lucrative enough? That’s a different story. 

NORTH PLATTE, Neb.—Angela Jones feels fortunate to have landed a job at the new meatpacking plant in this stagnant prairie town she’s long called home. She earns $24.50 an hour—far more than she made as a convenience-store clerk, custodian or construction flagger—and has health insurance for the first time in over 20 years. 

But she’s also felt stress learning her quality-control duties, such as scrutinizing meat cuts moving down the line and ensuring workers properly sanitize their tools. Days before the May opening, she confided her concerns to the human resources and safety manager, who tried to buck her up with a pep talk.

“I just don’t want to disappoint the company,” Jones, 58, said from under her yellow hard hat. “Or myself.”

A similar mix of optimism and nervousness grips North Platte as the roughly $400 million Sustainable Beef operation roars to life. 

Meatpacking is one of the jobs we are told “Americans won’t do,” but it turns out that they will. You just have to pay them well and have decent working conditions. 

It’s not that immigrants aren’t part of the workforce at the new Sustainable Beef plant in North Platte–since legal and illegal immigrants are the most experienced and skilled at cutting up carcasses due to prior experience, they are part of the mix they are an important part of the mix. 

But the Sustainable Beef plant proves that Americans WILL do the work if you make the working conditions good enough and the pay lucrative enough. Make the dirty job attractive enough with good pay and working conditions–and respect–and Americans will flock to do the work. 

The new facility is airier and more spacious than typical meatpacking plants, many of which came online in the 1960s. It provides workers with more space and reduces movements that can cause strain—one of its employment ads touts “no overhead throwing.”

Unlike traditional plants with dual shifts that require some employees to work late into the night, Sustainable Beef said it wanted to promote quality of life and family time for its workers, so it operates on a single, daytime shift.

It has sparkling stainless steel equipment and features technology such as artificial-intelligence-enabled systems to maximize the meat taken off a carcass and track workers’ efficiency.

At the plant, labor roles have split informally along racial and ethnic lines. Most production-line workers hired so far are Hispanics new to North Platte, according to employees and company officials. 

The reason: The operation prioritizes industry experience for the dangerous jobs of killing and cutting up carcasses quickly, and Hispanics are more likely to have that. White locals, meanwhile, gravitate toward positions in areas such as shipping, maintenance and cattle receiving, which don’t involve knife work, said Ashley Henning, the human resources and safety manager. She attributes this to unfamiliarity with production-line work.

The massive influx of immigrant labor has obviously served to depress wages for Americans who would compete with immigrants for jobs. Illegal immigrants, in particular, compete with blue-collar native-born workers, but not with the laptop class. Hence, open borders have created a massive redistribution of wealth from the working class to the laptop class, creating our populist moment. 

For all the talk of relieving inequality, the policies pursued by Democrats have exacerbated it. Wealthier Americans enjoy low-cost services subsidized by government-imported cheap labor. Blue-collar workers, in turn, see their wages depressed, turning them into a servant class competing with those flowing into the country. 

LOS ANGELES WOMAN SLAMS ICE: “I have friends texting me…my gardener didn’t show up, housekeeper didn’t show…farmer’s market is closed…everyone’s scared…you’re gonna have to do your own dishes, clean your own house, mow your own lawn!”pic.twitter.com/yLQPoCUS6d

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) June 15, 2025

The adjustment, should Trump succeed in drastically reducing the number of aliens in the country, will be a bit rough for the laptop class. They will no longer have nearly unlimited access to cheap labor, which is why you see all those liberals bitching that their gardeners will disappear and that nobody will be around to “wipe our asses.”

Do we really need illegal immigrants to “wipe our asses”? We do according to congresswoman Becca Balint. pic.twitter.com/UIFitGYUNg

— Vermonster 🇺🇸 (@pnshdvermonster) June 4, 2025

It’s the logic of the confederacy, which I suppose is appropriate for the Democrats.