New Jobs
Industry representatives have been urging for years that we water down our smog laws to create new jobs for our unemployed. Now, however, it appears from the Urban Institute study (Times, Dec. 21) that most of our new jobs are not for our unemployed, but for other people’s unemployed.
Our service industries, it seems, are growing so fast that 1.5 million new workers will be needed before the end of the decade, half of them foreign, and half of the foreign ones illegal.
I suppose it could be argued that jobs for resident citizens are so important that we should suffer yet more pollution for them, in effect subsidizing their jobs with our own, and our children’s health. But it hardly follows that we should pay with our health and with our taxes to provide jobs for illegal immigrants. Jobs are valuable as a means to our own people’s well-being, not as an invitation to outsiders at our own people’s expense, far less as an end in themselves. WARD ELLIOTT Claremont
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