What If They Gave a Boycott, and Nobody Noticed?

Monday's boycott seems to have proven something - that we need foreign workers a lot less than we thought.

In certain industries, they made their case. In the West and Midwest, a number of meatpacking companies were forced to close. In California and Arizona, produce fields were absent of migrant pickers. And in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, a number of businesses lacked sufficient staff to operate.

But the protests didn’t bring the economy to a halt, as some organizers had hoped. And that, says one economist, is because Americans overestimate the actual impact undocumented workers have on our economy. “It’s a positive benefit, but it’s not the be-all end-all of the economy,” says James P. Smith, an economist at the Rand Corporation who specializes in immigration labor.

Of course, I'm old enough to remember that, when Cesar Chavez's United Farmworkers Union went on strike in the early 70's, that farms simply turned to the more reliable automation and the farmworkers lost their jobs.