A shortage of workers is an advantage for the United States because it ensures wage raises and productivity gains, an op-ed in the New York Times said.
“The labor scarcity we’re experiencing is real … this is an opportunity, not a crisis,” David Autor, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said.
For example, the rising wages will pressure companies to equip their employees with labor-saving devices, such as robots, that allow them to get more work done faster. Their extra productivity allows higher wages and ensures better training, he wrote:
Couldn’t raising wages spur employers to automate many low-paid service jobs? Yes — but that’s not bad. There’s no future in working the fry station at White Castle. We should welcome the robot that’s now doing that job at some locations. Automating bad jobs has positive consequences for productivity. When employers pay more for human labor, they have an incentive to use it more productively … And one way to use people more productively is to train them. This may be one reason that employers provide more training opportunities in a tightening labor market — something happening now.
Also, the rising wages will reduce the hidden taxpayer subsidies to low-wage employers, he says:
Members of the bottom fifth of U.S. households receive an average of $9,500 per person per year in means-tested government benefits like Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps. More than 20 percent of income for the poorest fifth of households comes from refundable tax credits like the earned-income tax credit, which supports low-wage families with children. So, one reason companies can pay such low wages is that you’re paying for the things their low-wage workers can’t afford.…If wages were higher, more workers could pay for necessities out of pocket; we wouldn’t need to tax the rich as much to support the poor.
Autor is surrounded by progressives at MIT, so he downplays the economic havoc caused by the federal policy of using immigration to inflate the supply of cheap workers, taxpayer-aided consumers, and room-sharing renters.
This labor-inflation policy has been great for employers, elite graduates, and Wall Street investors. But just as inflation hurts people who rely on cash, immigration hurts Americans who rely on wages — including many of Autor’s American students — by lowering their wages, spiking their rents, and minimizing the incentive for employers to give labor-saving machines to their employers.
For the past 40 years, our economy has generated vast numbers of low-paid, economically insecure jobs with few prospects for career advancement. On almost every measure — pay, working environment, prior notice of job termination, and access to paid vacation, sick time and family leave — non-college-educated U.S. workers fare worse than comparable workers in other wealthy industrialized nations. Consider this: Low-education workers in Canada make one-third more per hour than their U.S. counterparts.
However, many business groups and professionals are now backing legislation that would amnesty many millions of illegal migrants — but not offer any protection against the next wave of cheap-labor migrants.
Uvalde Station Border Patrol agents apprehend a large group of migrants in May. (Photo: U.S. Border Patrol/Del Rio Sector)
For example, Jonathan Rauch at the Brookings Institute touted an investor-driven plan that would allow companies to pressure state officials to provide them with cheap foreign labor instead of the employers having to bargain with Americans for their labor. In an article for the pro-migration TheAtlantic.com site, he wrote:
In [Utah GOP John] Rep. Curtis’s 2019 version, every state would have the option of sponsoring 5,000 work visas a year, plus an additional allotment based on its population, up to a nationwide total of 500,000. No state would be obligated to sponsor anyone, so states could shut their doors if they chose to. They could favor tech workers, farmworkers, family members; they could even use their visas to temporarily legalize undocumented workers already living there. The only requirements would be that the visas couldn’t be employer-specific (so bosses couldn’t use them to blackmail workers with deportation threats) and that the immigrants holding them live and work in the state that sponsored them.
But, of course, companies would immediately start threatening to quit each state that refuses to force down Americans’ local wage levels by importing more foreign workers — just as investors now threaten to quit states if they do not get taxpayer-funded tax breaks for building private sports stadiums and factories.
And the immigrant workers would be kept at a second-class level with not-yet-described curbs on their movement to other states, Rauch indirectly admitted:
How would the plan prevent immigrants from moving out of state? Each state would be required to report where its visa holders live and work, and if it couldn’t account for them, it would lose visas the next year. States that administered their programs well would be rewarded with more visas.
Curtis’ plan has been road-tested before. In 2017, for example, GOP Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) touted a similar plan — but dropped it after Breitbart News exposed it.
However, this plan was endorsed by Joe Biden’s campaign in 2020 — and his staff includes many people with close ties to the pro-migration investors. The plan is now included in Biden’s January 20 immigration proposal, alongside sections that would allow U.S. employers to trade all their white-collar jobs to endless foreign graduates in exchange for the deferred prize of government-provided green cards.
Biden is currently calling for amnesties and more migrants — even as he is also praising labor shortages.
Migration is deeply unpopular because it damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, raises their rents, curbs their productivity, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, and wrecks their democratic, compromise-promoting civic culture.
For many years, a wide variety of pollsters have shown deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates.
This pocketbook opposition is multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and recognizes the solidarity Americans owe to each other.
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