Immigration, like outsourcing and tighter regulation of unions, allowed employers to pay less for many kinds of labor. But immigrants came with other huge costs: new schools, new roads, translation (formal and informal), and health care for those who could not afford it. Those externalities were absorbed by the public, not the businessmen who benefited from immigration. Naturally businessmen preferred this arrangement to the old one, which had involved paying expensive benefits to an entitled, querulous, native-born, and sometimes unionized workforce.
