Are illegal immigrants taking away American jobs? Tim Carney says it doesn't show up in the unemployment rate, but Mickey Kaus suggests this might not be a reliable measure:
Lay person here: So a native-born worker is in his 60s. Migrants surge into his sector, wages fall (in part because they're willing to work for less, in part due to sheer numbers). He says "F__k it, I'll just retire." Hard to say this retirement is a) unrelated to the migrant… https://t.co/lPHdSJCys1
— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) June 7, 2024
Let's look at this. The big surge in illegal immigration started in 2021, so let's see if people in their 60s have been retiring at a higher rate since then:
Nope. The number of folks in their 60s who are still working has gone up. And it's the same story for age 65-69.
How about zooming in on Carney's chart of unemployment for the native born?
It's currently at 3.8% and has been shrinking or flat the entire time. But unemployment numbers can miss people who have exited the labor force and given up. So let's look at the participation rate for natives:
It's up. Finally, here's a look at the number of people who are new claimants of Social Security each year. This is for retired workers only, not survivors or those on disability:
This one starts back in 2001 because you need to look at current retirements compared to the pre-pandemic trend. It's been below trend for the entire period of high border crossings.
It's easy to make up endless "But what if...." scenarios when the basic data doesn't support your preferences. Anyone can play. You guys do it to me all the time in comments.
Sometimes these scenarios legitimately need to be investigated. But most often they're nothing more than mud on the walls, hoping against hope that you can introduce enough confusion to get people on your side. But in this case, there's just no there there. All the available data suggests that native-born workers of all stripes are in strong demand and have jobs.
Of course, the last refuge of the mud-tosser is a hypothetical. Maybe if illegal immigration had stayed low these numbers would be even better. Sure, maybe. And it's unprovable one way or the other, so there's no way to argue the contrary. You win!
However, if you just want to know what the available evidence says, it says that the recent surge in border crossings hasn't had any noticeable effect on wages, employment, or retirement for the native born. There might be isolated effects in certain industries or regions, but if there are they must be small enough not to impact the overall picture.
None of this should surprise anyone. There's a good deal of evidence that illegal immigrants compete for a different set of jobs than native-born Americans. Migrants mostly take the crummy jobs that natives turn down because they can get better ones—by virtue of their fluent English and legal work status. The border crossers simply live and work in a whole different economy than those born here.
So Mickey knows a lot of sixty year old lettuce pickers. Didn’t have that in my bingo card.
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It’s pretty indisputable that meatpacking used to be a highly unionized family-wage (if unglamorous) job. Lots of men did it. Hell, Green Bay named their football team after meatpackers.
And an influx of illegal migrants allowed those corporations to bust the unions.
Today, I doubt that the principal complaint about migrants is that they are taking away jobs—sure, you hear that from the talking heads on Fox News.
But from everyday folks you’ll hear about the cost of housing, educating, and providing health care for them—which is substantial.
Do migrants contribute to home building and health care? Of course. No one says they’re a 100% drain on the economy. Are they driving up the price of housing and straining our ability to provide sufficient public education and health care? It’s ok to say that they are without being a bigot, and trying to figure out how best to address that.
Seriously, Kevin... you're till reading the Trump-curious goat fucker Mickey Kaus?
I *LOVE* Bob Wright’s books “The Moral Animal” and “Why Buddhism Is True.” But Bob’s friendship with the”goat fucker” Kaus really puts paid to it
Something is missing from this analysis. Namely the amount of illegal immigration over the time periods in question. If that hasn't changed why would you expect anything else to change? Suppose the claim was that drunk drivers kill people. Showing the rate of traffic deaths was constant would not show that drunk drivers don't kill people.
A friend of mine who is convinced that illegal immigrants are taking jobs responds to all of these statistics by citing the anecdote of construction workers. He says that 30 years ago, young Americans could get good paying jobs in construction, but that now most construction jobs are held by illegals who work for much less, and he points to the illegal immigrants who cluster in Home Depot parking lots waiting to be picked up by contractors and taken to jobsites. I wonder if there are good statistics on the impact of illegal immigrants in the construction industry?
I can't speak to the market for small, residential construction projects, but I know that a high percentage of large, commercial construction projects are required to pay Davis-Bacon wage rates. Contractors on large projects are not required to check immigration status of their workers, but they are required to pay high wages regardless. Federal inspectors audit this, usually by interviewing workers and asking to see their pay stubs.
So large contractors have no incentive at all to hire illegals, and strong incentive *not* to hire illegals since they don't want their site to get raided.
The bottom line is this: the crew that replaces the roof on your neighbor's house might have a lot of illegals getting paid pennies on the dollar. But the much larger crew building the new high-rise downtown are mostly legal. Tell your friend to stop whining.
That’s a fair point, but for small contractors who are not audited by the government, he would argue that illegal immigration depresses construction wages, since illegal workers are willing to work for less than American workers would otherwise get if the illegal workers weren’t present. On average, we know that wages are rising higher than inflation, but is there any evidence as to whether wages in certain areas such as residential construction are depressed by the influx of illegal immigration workers in those areas? That’s my friend’s argument in a nutshell, and citing average national wages won’t dissuade him.
"is there any evidence as to whether wages in certain areas such as residential construction are depressed . . ."
Well, you or your "friend" might try looking up the numbers, since we have an entire federal agency that collects them for you. For example:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t19.htm
You can look at hourly earnings and weekly earnings by sector; fwiw, from May 2023 to May 2024, average weekly earnings for the construction sector look to be up by about 5%.
Immigration is at the top of the list of voter concerns. It has little to do with the facts and everything to do with perceptions that drive fears and worries. It's not that crime is being driven up by immigration; it isn't. It's not that immigrants are sucking up resources; they aren't. It's not that immigrants are displacing native born people in jobs. That's not happening either.
But when you poll voters, all those concerns come up. And facts won't change their minds. Thus Biden's latest move on limiting immigration.
As of 2016 (latest I could find), according to Pew, about 3.9 million kindergarten through 12th-grade students in U.S. public and private schools in 2014 – or 7.3% of the total – were children of unauthorized immigrants.
I wouldn’t call educating these children “sucking up resources,” but it obviously isn’t free.
"Immigration is at the top of the list of voter concerns."
This is only true if you're a Republican. For Democrats inflation, Climate, Healthcare, Civil Rights and Guns all beat out Immigration as the top concern
The idea that immigrants (or native babies becoming adults) “take” jobs is stupid at face, because new entrants to the economy spend their earnings and thus create a job for each they take.
This. The same anti-immigrant zealots who scream about the (brown) immigrants stealing our jobs will often celebrate and cheer the idea of (white) migrants moving into their state and job market.
An immigrant that agrees to work for $20 an hour and displaces a native who was working for $40 an hour—do the math. If you think that’s a 1:1 trade off, try doing the math again.
Independent of overall conclusions, how can anyone look at the shape of the curve for "Unemployment Rate; Native born" and conclude a linear trend line is indicated?
Because Excel (and Google Sheets) has a very handy "add trendline" option on charts.
Remember the kerfuffle when some Trump admin people came up with some contorted curve fitting algorithm to show that Covid would go away in a matter of weeks/months?
Kevin does clarify: "... has been shrinking OR FLAT the entire time. " [emphasis added]
For charting new retirees over the past twenty years, I think you must account for the baby boom. I am not convinced that your trend line shows what we should expect, just based on the demographics.
Undocumented workers are filling in at starting wage jobs, not median. If you're mid-60s and still earning starting wage, are you really able to choose retirement?
I'm just saying, the scenario seems improbable.
Also, it can't be that difficult for anyone to learn the concept of V/U. Labor continues to remain tight.
An illegal immigrant couldn't get my job. In recent weeks, a saw an article about a worker in Michigan who had to be rescued from a trench that had collapsed. They did not speak English so... probably an illegal. And apparently not very good at construction. It happens.
If any democrat running for office makes this Drum "meh" argument they should be slapped across the head. There is no upside to illegal immigration worth arguing for because it is ILLEGAL.
Wrong, there is upside to illegal immigration. There is the obvious upside to business owners of having a large labor pool that can be totally exploited without consequence. And there is also upside to the larger economy: per The Economist, the average Mexican immigrant working in the US is 4X more productive than they were in Mexico. This is true regardless of whether they are here legally, and even regardless of whether they have learned any new job skills here. The US economy is really amazingly good at harnessing available resources, including labor. As long as unemployment remains low, every immigrant regardless of status punches well above their weight in contributing to the economy.
Well, sure, they punch above their weight—in Mexico.
Here, they work for minimum wage, allow employers to decimate unions and move money that otherwise would go into workers’ pockets to the pockets of owners (which is far worse for the economy). Then they drive up the price of limited housing and place demands on the publicly funded health care and education system.
You can’t make a complete argument without analyzing all of this. It’s highly unlikely that our income inequality would have become so bad if corporations hadn’t had access to an enormous pool of illegal workers to exploit.
Trump’s actual plan is to deport 15 million people. In order to accomplish this there will be a deportation force unlike anything ever seen. Fifty percent of illegal immigrants have been here more than 10 years. Millions have been here more than 20 years. These are people who have families. Their children born here are citizens. Many millions will be forced out of the country. Steven Miller has talked openly about setting up “camps” to house those rounded up by the deportation force. Transporting them to their native countries will be difficult and costly. The entire project will require a budget that will rival or surpass our military budget. Is there any doubt that many thousand of people will die?
But, I guess it’s all ok because after all, they are ILLEGAL.
" In order to accomplish this there will be a deportation force unlike anything ever seen."
Long before this force will accomplish the deportation it will be used against cictizen, the way Hitler used the SA and then SS. That is the purpose of it, and immigrants are just an excuse as far as Trump is concerned (Steven Miller may really believe it is about immigrants).
The “beauty” of this plan is it will accomplish both things. With so many being deported there are bound to be a few “mistakes”. “Perhaps you should reconsider protesting lest you find yourself amongst those mistakes.”
"There is no upside to illegal immigration worth arguing for because it is ILLEGAL."
I presume by the same token you are ardently against Trump because, after all, he is also "illegal," having been convicted of 34 felonies. Accordingly, he's all downside (even ignoring all the other ways in which he is all downside).
Despise Trump, love immigrants (one of my proudest life achievements has been writing letters for people trying obtain citizenship), but in a political context there is no upside arguing for illegal immigrants . If you want to make it about the humanitarian angle, then know that illegal immigrants are exploited to the nth degree in this country, and worse at the border and along all points of transit. For me, there is no top number for the number of LEGAL immigrants we bring in and I argue that point all the time, but advocating for illegal immigrants (outside of humane treatment once here) is political suicide.
Has anyone, anywhere ever seriously advocated for more illegal immigration?
Some economists do exactly that, for totally straightforward economic reasons. Nearly everyone agrees that the global economy benefits massively from free movement of goods, services, capital, and information. And economists absolutely add free movement of labor to that list. But for various reasons - most but not all of them bad - politicians generally just won't go there.
no person is illegal
use your brain, and find a better argument to make against liberalized immigration
jdubs--Exhibit A
It is only ILLEGAL because we chose to make it illegal. It's not like God handed down a tablet with the Eleventh Commandment: "Crossing the border without proper documentation shall be a sin"
We could change the law tomorrow and make it legal, or a civil penalty or anything we like. Hell, we could PAY people to cross the border and the cost-benefit analysis would be the same.
Migrants mostly take the crummy jobs that natives turn down because they can get better ones—by virtue of their fluent English and legal work status.
Kevin! Native-born tech industry workers are going to be pissed off!
Remember a few years ago there was this big thing about H1-B workers taking away jobs from (mostly white) programmers?
Thank you for taking it upon yourself to read and debunk Kaus so that we don't have to. He's consistently awful.
Are we just learning Kaus is awful?
"It's easy to make up endless "But what if...." scenarios when the basic data doesn't support your preferences. Anyone can play. You guys do it to me all the time in comments."
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"Migrants mostly take the crummy jobs that natives turn down because they can get better ones."
Respectfully, that statement is just wrong.
Look at Australia: they lack a low cost/low wage labor pool. Yet, all the Australian crops get picked, the houses are cleaned and the restaurants have labor. Rather, wages and working conditions rise until a new market equilibrium is reached.
"The big surge in illegal immigration started in 2021" Illegal immigration at the southern border increased `120% in 2019, all from the northern triangle. That's when the surge started, briefly interrupted in 2020 by covid.
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