Why Americans are unwilling to do the dirty work?

The question has come up in the wake of Alabama's disgusting new immigration law that requires the police to question anyone they suspect is in the U.S. illegally. As you might guess, many frightened farm workers have left the state, leaving plenty of openings for field hands, hotel housekeepers, dishwashers, and chicken plant employees. And just as predictably, native Alabamians haven't exactly come running. Too bad Alabama lawmakers couldn't put aside their prejudices and recognize that certain kinds of bruising manual jobs will never attract much interest. Business Week looks at the problem in its cover story:

The notion of jobs in fields and food plants as "immigrant work" is relatively new. As late as the 1940s, most farm labor in Alabama and elsewhere was done by Americans. During World War II the U.S. signed an agreement with Mexico to import temporary workers to ease labor shortages. Four and a half million Mexican guest workers crossed the border. At first most went to farms and orchards in California; by the program's completion in 1964 they were working in almost every state. Many braceros--the term translates to "strong-arm," as in someone who works with his arms--were granted green cards, became permanent residents, and continued to work in agriculture. Native-born Americans never returned to the fields. "Agricultural labor is basically 100 percent an immigrant job category," says Princeton University sociologist Doug Massey, who studies population migration. "Once an occupational category becomes dominated by immigrants, it becomes very difficult to erase the stigma."

Massey says Americans didn't turn away from the work merely because it was hard or because of the pay but because they had come to think of it as beneath them. "It doesn't have anything to do with the job itself," he says. In other countries, citizens refuse to take jobs that Americans compete for. In Europe, Massey says, "auto manufacturing is an immigrant job category. Whereas in the States, it's a native category."

[CUT]

Companies such as Tyson Foods found the state's climate, plentiful water supply, light regulation, and anti-union policies to be ideal. At the time, better-educated American workers in cities such as Decatur and Athens were either moving into the state's burgeoning aerospace and service industries or following the trend of leaving Alabama and heading north or west, where they found office jobs or work in manufacturing with set hours, higher pay, and safer conditions--things most Americans take for granted. In just over a decade, school districts in once-white towns such as Albertville, in the northeastern corner of the state, became 34 percent Hispanic. By the 2000s, Hispanic immigrants had moved across the state, following the construction boom in the cities, in the growing plant nurseries in the south, and on the catfish farms west of Montgomery. It wasn't until anti-immigration sentiment spread across the country, as the recession took hold and didn't let go, that the Republican legislators who run Alabama began to regard the immigrants they once courted as the enemy.