In his latest piece, New York Times columnist Eduardo Porter writes that, despite exaggerated concerns that low-skilled immigrant workers take jobs and depress wages, America needs such workers to grow the economy. Low-skilled immigrants, Porter writes, consume American goods and services, raise economic output, reduce prices, and complement the skill-sets of the native-born, while immigration as a whole increases productivity and stimulates investment.
See key excerpts of Porter’s piece below, and find it in its entirety here.
Let’s just say it plainly: The United States needs more low-skilled immigrants.
You might consider, for starters, the enormous demand for low-skilled workers, which could well go unmet as the baby boom generation ages out of the labor force, eroding the labor supply. Eight of the 15 occupations expected to experience the fastest growth between 2014 and 2024 — personal care and home health aides, food preparation workers, janitors and the like — require no schooling at all.
“Ten years from now, there are going to be lots of older people with relatively few low-skilled workers to change their bedpans,” said David Card, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. “That is going to be a huge problem.”
But the argument for low-skilled immigration is not just about filling an employment hole. The millions of immigrants of little skill who swept into the work forcein the 25 years up to the onset of the Great Recession — the men washing dishes in the back of the restaurant, the women emptying the trash bins in office buildings — have largely improved the lives of Americans.
The politics of immigration are driven, to this day, by the proposition that immigrant laborers take the jobs and depress the wages of Americans competing with them in the work force. It is a mechanical statement of the law of supply and demand: More workers spilling in over the border will inevitably reduce the price of work.
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.
What is critical to understand, in light of the current political debate, is that contrary to conventional wisdom, less-skilled immigration does not just knock less-educated Americans out of their jobs. It often leads to the creation of new jobs — at better wages — for natives, too. Notably, it can help many Americans to move up the income ladder. And by stimulating investment and reallocating work, it increases productivity.
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A critical insight of the new research into the impact of immigration is that employers are not the only ones to adapt to the arrival of cheap foreign workers by, say, investing in a new restaurant or a new strawberry-packing plant. American-born workers react, too, moving into occupations that are better shielded from the newcomers, and even upgrading their own skills.
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It is not crazy for American workers who feel their wages going nowhere, and their job opportunities stuck, to fear immigration as yet another threat to their livelihoods. And yet for all the alarm about the prospect of poor, uneducated immigrants flocking across the border, this immigration has been mostly benign.
Take the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the immigration reform bill submitted without success by a bipartisan group of eight senators in 2013. By 2033, it estimated, the plan would have increased average wages by 0.5 percent, and do next to nothing to the wages of the least skilled. It would have made the economy some 5 percent bigger, over the long term, mainly because there would be 16 million more people.
If there is anything to fear, it is not a horde of less-educated workers ready to jump over the border. The United States’ main immigration problem, looking into the future, is that too few low-skilled immigrants may be willing to come.
As the National Academies noted about its report, “The inflow of labor supply has helped the United States avoid the problems facing other economies that have stagnated as a result of unfavorable demographics, particularly the effects of an aging work force and reduced consumption by older residents.” There will be an employment hole to fill.
