by KYW’s Brad Segall

A local expert says it’s easy for businesses to hire illegal immigrants but it’s difficult to predict what would happen to our economy if those undocumented workers were suddenly no longer in the workforce.
   
Temple University law professor and former INS assistant commissioner Jan Ting says proponents of open borders believe that it’s good for business in the United States if companies hire immigrants.
  
In the Philadelphia region, he says, there’s a significant amount of unemployment but it tends to be people with special needs: ex-offenders, single parents, people with addictions. And Ting (right) says many companies don’t want to take the chance on them, so they hire cheap labor from abroad:

"Too many employers say, 'You know what? Rather than go through the hassle of dealing with American workers who have all these special needs, we’d rather hire immigrants who are just hard working. They don’t complain, they don’t have any family problems that we have to pay attention to.' ”

But what would happen if they suddenly began rounding up illegals? Ting says the economic impact would be hard to gauge, but he says many industries could mechanize and automate:
 
"We see out in farming communities -- out in California and Arizona -- that where the supply of immigrant labor gets reduced, they go to mechanization and automation requiring smaller numbers of better skilled, better paid workers in the agricultural industry."
  
And he believes that would happen in other industries as well.