Illegal immigrants depress wages...

[Peter_Puget]

of other illegals!

 

The rapid growth in Hispanic employment appears to have come at the price of lower wages. Contributing to this trend is their concentration in specific segments of the labor market, in particular, the lower-skill occupations. Consequently, real wages for Hispanic workers declined for the second consecutive year in 2004. The cumulative decline over the past two years amounts to 5 percent, and, as a result, the earnings of Hispanic workers have fallen even further behind the earnings of non-Hispanic workers. The decrease in the earnings of Latino workers has been led by new immigrants who have accounted for the vast majority of new jobs for Hispanics but at relatively low wages. Those immigrants also suffered among the largest losses in earnings in 2004. The fact that employers were able to fill their payrolls without having to bid up wages is evidence that some slack remains in the labor market.

 

Will this impact immigration?

 

Will undocumented workers start to be hired further up the food chain?

 

Free minds, free markets!

[Peter_Puget]

Whoops here is a link: here

[willstrickland]

The eye opener for me when I was working in Hillsboro is how these folks earn extremely low wages, yet still manage to send a good deal of money home to Mexico. I imagine the wage down there for construction and low level service sector like janitorial/maid is probably less than half what it is here.

 

But this problem is not limited to immigrants or low wage workers, it's systemic. Here's a quote from a Financial Times article from today:

 

"According to the government's employment cost index, wages grew by just 2.4 per cent in the first quarter against a year ago, the slowest rate on record. With companies still in parsimonious mood and plenty of slack

still left in the labourmarket, the scales arestill stacked in favour of employers in salary negotiations."

 

(Emphasis added).

 

I don't see it affecting immigration at all with the large wage discrepancy and easy border crossing/proximity. Although the pending housing market collapse should stem the immigration tide somewhat.

 

"Will undocumented workers start to be hired further up the food chain?"

 

Not likely. It's gotta be cheaper just to keep them where they are and have the work done remotely. See: customer service call centers in New Dehli, radiologists reading MRIs and X-Rays from Bangalore, programmers in Singapore, tax preparers in......you get my drift.

 

Makes you wonder about the validity of the unemployment stats, with "slack" in the labor market. Of course, productivity increases can account for some of it.

 

I am in the camp believes we need immigrants badly to help counter the effects of the boomer age wave. Of course we need them to be legal and paying taxes considering the drain they put on public services like schools and healthcare. But, we need them. By making it easy for them to immigrate legally, it might also reduce the concentrated impact they have on certain border communities by spreading out the destinations.

[JoshK]

Well put, Will.

 

Unfortunately, Immigration has become (or rather has been for a while) an issue that right has turned into a ideological, rather than a pragmatic debate. With the economic evidence condraticing their arguments they have turned to the "immigrants cause crime, steal your jobs, dont speak English, steal free services" brain wash. Sad.

 

Oh, and for those who are interested, the research shows that, overall, immigrant Americans are found to cause equivilent or lower amounts of crime than native-born Americans. I did a short paper on this and found the numbers pretty interesting.