CGD in the News

The Danger From Low-Skilled Immigrants: Not Having Them (New York Times)

August 08, 2017

From the article:

This proposition underpins President Trump’s threat to get rid of the 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the country. It is used to justify his plan to cut legal immigration into the country by half and create a point system to ensure that only immigrants with high skills are allowed entrance in the future.

But it is largely wrong. It misses many things: that less-skilled immigrants are also consumers of American-made goods and services; that their cheap labor raises economic output and also reduces prices. It misses the fact that their children tend to have substantially more skills. In fact, the children of immigrants contribute more to state fiscal coffers than do other native-born Americans, according to a report by the National Academies...
 
One study found that when the Bracero Program that allowed farmers to import Mexican workers ended in 1964, the sudden stop in the supply of cheap foreign labor did nothing to raise the wages of American farmworkers. From the cotton crop to the beet crop and the tomato crop, farmers brought in machines rather than pay higher wages.