Why Immigrants Are Not Stealing American Jobs
A Response to Elizabeth Dwoskin At the age of 14, I got my first job in which I was unknowingly working for illegal immigrants. I knew nothing about contracts or taxes; in fact, I never signed a contract at that place. As I grew older and learned more about the importance of legal documents and my own rights as an employee, I found a new legal job. Many American employers have illegal immigrants working for them without being aware of it, and many immigrants work extremely hard to achieve recognition from their peers, and in a way I can relate to that feeling due to my background as a foreigner. Staff writer for Bloomberg Businessweek Elizabeth Dwoskin in her article “Why Americans Won’t Do Dirty Jobs” examines the problems regarding immigrant labor in the United States (Dwoskin, 2011, p. 6). In “Why Americans Won’t Do Dirty Jobs” Elizabeth Dwoskin explores why a number of jobs go unfilled when the country is so focused on unemployment (Dwoskin, 2011, p. 7). Dwoskin investigates why immigrant workers are leaving their jobs in Alabama and why American citizens won’t fill the vacant positions…show more content… Her view, that “Americans won’t do dirty jobs”, is evident in her title as well as in various statements throughout the article (Dwoskin, 2011, p. 6). For example, Dwoskin states that “It’s a hard-to-resist syllogism: Dirty jobs are available; Americans won’t fill them; thus, Americans are too soft for dirty jobs” (Dwoskin, 2011, p. 9). Dwoskin’s syllogism is true in a sense. However, she does contradict it later on when she explains that Americans are in fact working in “dirty jobs” where the benefits are better (Dwoskin, 2011, p. 9). One could say that by contradicting herself, Dwoskin makes her article less effective. In fact, Dwoskin supports her main ideas by doing this, which is evident in the following ideas
