Alex Nowrasteh, writing at The Federalist, tortures the facts and they inevitably submit: more immigration is always an unalloyed good and if you don’t believe it you’ve been cruelly mislead.
The perception that high-skilled immigrants have a positive impact on the economy is correct. But lower-skilled immigrants also have a positive effect, despite what the public thinks. Cutting off or removing lower-skilled immigrants would hurt the labor market and economy as a whole. It’s more important to have public policy consistent with the evidence rather than with the perceptions of a minority of voters.
Immigrants of all skill levels have both a supply and demand effect on the economy as a whole and on the labor market specifically. On the supply side, immigration increases the number of workers. In a very simple model this would decrease wages, but immigrants and natives tend to work in very different occupations, meaning there isn’t much competition between the two groups. In other words, an increase in the supply of farm workers will not lower the wages for accountants.
Well, he’s right on that. But an increase in the supply of people who can sort checks manually will decrease wages for designers and makers of automatic check-sorting machines. In other words if you cherry-pick the data ferociously enough, you can substantiate a case for anything.
Meanwhile, I return to a very simple fact. Real wages per worker are at best increasing phlegmatically. If there were strong demand for STEM workers or for manual laborers you would expect real wages to increase. That isn’t happening.
There’s just a bare possibility that when people are fearful for their jobs because their neighbors have lost their jobs because they’ve been been given to newly imported workers at lower wages that might not show up in the statistics he’s citing. Both Gallup and Pew have reported that three-quarters of Americans think that immigration is just about right or should be reduced. Isn’t it just barely possible that they’re right and that their views are based on observation rather than on prejudice or propaganda?
