Is More Immigration the Solution to Our Labor Force Issues?

The editors of the Washington Post seem convinced that the solution to our labor force issues is more immigration:

Two things are simultaneously true. First, the Biden administration has mishandled immigration messaging by telling migrants not to come even as it pressed for more humane — meaning relaxed — border policies. Second, without a more forward-looking immigration policy, one more closely aligned with labor-force demands in an economy starved for workers, the nation’s long-term economic growth prospects will be stunted.

I am not opposed to increased immigration if it means bringing in the workers we actually need but I think the editors are drawing the wrong conclusions from the data. Consider this graph:

I also went to the trouble of determining the wages of all classes of workers in constant dollars. Short version: wages of individuals with college degrees or better are keeping up with inflation; wages for all other workers are not.

Demand is not determined by “Want Ads” but by willingness to pay. I will purchase every $20 gold piece you care to sell for its face value—$20. That cannot be interpreted as high demand.

If there were a high demand for workers without college degrees, their wages would be rising in real terms. They aren’t. Furthermore, there is a roughly 35% premium paid to legal immigrants without college degrees or better, cf. here. Solving that by legalizing all workers rests on a dLAWassumption: that the five bucks per hour saved by hiring illegal immigrants doesn’t result in more of them being hired. I think it does. Also note the small increase in the slope of the wages for workers without college educations in 2019. You can’t make a trend from a single point but that at least provides some indication that limiting illegal immigration resulted in the wages of the workers with whom they were in competition to rise a little.

My conclusion is quite different from that of the editors. My proposal would be to grow less produce requiring hand labor, have fewer fast food restaurants that demand people working at minimum wage or less, do less construction that depends on workers earning minimum wage or less, let Americans mow their lawns, and so on.

Thinking otherwise is objectively wanting a national economy that depends on a continuing flow of new workers who don’t earn a living wage and orients itself around such an untenable situation.