"Dey tuk r jobs!"

That's a South Park quote, btw.

So the Economist has an interesting article about whether or not immigrants actually push down wages for low-skilled workers.

Over the past 25 years American incomes have become less equally distributed, typical wages have grown surprisingly slowly for such a healthy economy and the real wages of the least skilled have actually fallen. It is plausible that immigration is at least partly to blame, especially because recent arrivals have disproportionately poor skills.

However, according to the economic theory,

wages depend on the supply of capital as well as labour. Alone, an influx of immigrants raises the supply of workers and hence reduces wages. But cheaper labour increases the potential return to employers of building new factories or opening new valet-parking companies. In so doing, they create extra demand for workers.

According to the Economist's survey of economic studies, immigration from the past 25 years has suppressed wages from 8% to less than 1%, with most estimates falling on the lower end.

However, those models are full of holes and dubious assumptions, as even a cursory glance can see.

But the punchline is probably valid:

None of these studies is decisive, but taken together they suggest that immigration, in the long run, has had only a small negative effect on the pay of America's least skilled and even that is arguable. If Congress wants to reduce wage inequality, building border walls is a bad way of going about it.

Wage inequality is a huge issue, and Mexican day laborers are not the major culprits.


UPDATE:

Since I'm writing about this, I might as well link to this WSJ article by Mayim Bialik's little brother that argues that no one has any idea how many illegal immigrants are in the country, so any numbers tossed around are very misleading.

Paul Krugman argued a week or so ago that "a guest worker program is clearly designed by and for corporate interests, who'd love to have a low-wage work force that couldn't vote. Not only is it deeply un-American; it does nothing to reduce the adverse effect of immigration on wages."

Over at Slate, Jacob Weisberg half-assedly argues that "the system works in its way. The most motivated, tenacious, and enterprising immigrants, who are therefore the most economically desirable, find a way around the barriers we erect. Once here, they help our economy sustain a high rate of growth and subsidize our Social Security system. In return, those who choose to stay have a chance to create better lives for their children. Do we really want to put an end to this deal?"

Over at WaPo, Robert Samuelson argues for strengthening border and employer enforcement, granting amnesty to existing illegal immigrants, and scrapping the guest worker idea (as he writes, "businesses' complaints of widespread labor 'shortages' mainly put a respectable face on their thirst for cheap labor"). Sounds like a pretty sensible consensus position.



Tags: news and politics, immigration, illegal immigration, neoliberal, guest worker, justice, amnesty