Ezra Klein put up an interview yesterday with our real border czar, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. It was interesting. Mayorkas talked about several causes of increased illegal immigration, the prime one being the evolution of highly professionalized smuggling organizations. He also mentioned wars and crime surges in certain Central American countries, which have motivated more people to leave. And there's the huge and growing backlog of asylum cases, which has made asylum requests a free ticket to at least 5-10 years in the US while waiting for a judge to decide your case.
But one thing that neither he nor Ezra mentions is the simplest one of all: jobs. When jobs are plentiful, we get more illegal immigrants. When jobs are scarce, we get fewer.
I've mentioned this before, but here's yet another way to look at it. If there are more job openings than actual hires, it means US businesses are urgently in need of workers. So let's look at the difference between openings and hires over the past decade:
Illegal immigration follows the job market almost perfectly. But not quite: there are still spikes that happen for other reasons. The 2019 spike was likely due to the start of professional smuggling organizations and ended quickly because of Donald Trump's brutal family separation policy. The 2023 spike, according to Mayorkas, was due to a temporary gap in Mexican border enforcement. And the 2020 dip in jobs was obviously because of the pandemic.
So there are policy changes and other outside events that make a difference, but usually only for short periods. Generally speaking, illegal immigration is all about jobs and not much else.
People migrate because they believe it will improve their lives. This has been going on for thousands of years.
Can you do a chart comparing unauthorized border crossings with authorized immigration?
Perfect case for follow the money. Politics is part of it but Mexican and Chinese make up the two largest blocks by origin which supports the jobs base.
I would really like to see how a national ID card implementation affects this behavior.
I vote for the commercialization of human trafficking. The Narcos expanding their business.
It could also just be that border crossing numbers the past few years are a lie. The border patrol wants Trump.
if that's true, why have the numbers plunged this year? that makes as much sense as claims that bls numbers are rigged in favor of democrats.
That chart looks sensible. Probably a good point.
unclear to me. Asylum immigration is legal and I believe is a much larger portion than before.
This is hardly a news story. People have always come to America for the financial opportunities and to flee violence. The Irish didn't come here for the bigotry!
With El Salvador much safer now, and the potential end of Maduro, we could see some lessening of the forces pushing immigrants to come here. If Trump does manage to win, a trade war could damage the economy enough that the pull dries up as well - at least for a while.
Isn't the obvious corollary of that argument that the people who complain about "immigrants taking away/bidding down american jobs" are actually correct?
If the illegal immigrants were not available, presumably the salaries offered for those jobs would rise...
Which
- has been the orthodox economist view for years
- is the one of the two primary complaints against immigration on the intelligent right (eg organizations like Cato)
- has been a taboo claim on the left, again for years
I won't endorse your entire argument, but it coheres with a point that has bothered me for decades: When people (usually from the left) say "Immigrants come here to do the jobs that Americans won't do", what they really mean is, "Immigrants come here to do the jobs that Americans won't do *for the wages that are currently being offered.*"
Of course, if wages for many of these jobs rose to the point where they woule be atttractive to non-immigrants, prices for many goods and services -- particularly agricultural products -- would spike upward dramatically. Choose your own downside.
If wages are to rise it means that prices will also, to some extent. If you argue that wages must be kept down so that prices will not rise you are a conservative, not a liberal.
The conservative view is that there must be very low-paid workers to supply the goods and services that the elite can buy at low prices. And this is basically how the US economy has worked with respect to the agricultural work which most immigrants from Latin America do. That work was formerly done by slave and then "freed" blacks until about WW II.
So long as the ratio of unemployed persons to vacancies remains negative this "corollary" is false. See: https://www.bls.gov/charts/job-openings-and-labor-turnover/unemp-per-job-opening.htm#
Salaries don't necessarily rise when labor demand outstrips supply. Instead, work can be deferred, particularly in the jobs that these undocumented workers fill.
Take for instance migrant farm workers. When they're cut off from entering and there's a lack of labor supply, farmers defer work, cutting back on the amount of food harvested, leading to rising prices at the grocery store.
A business only has jobs because it has customers. Every immigrant is a customer of many businesses helping to create more jobs including jobs with higher pay.
If that's not part of your economic orthodoxy, your economic orthodoxy is bunk.
And for how long can a population keep growing in the name of growing an economy?
So the solution could be:
E-Verify for every single job
Increase the budgets for State and Federal DOL to reduce wage theft and enforce working conditions.
Increase the Federal minimum wage and eliminate the sub minimum wage.
i.e., remove the incentives built into the system to hire off the books or exploit labor.
KD has long supported e-verify.
All your ideas are good.
If Trump is elected and he actually enacts his tariff program, it might well tank the US economy and thereby reduce the pull factors for illegal migration, thus fulfilling one of his campaign promises!
Bbbut, it has to be all about asylum no? ...
Do we really need these workers? The businesses which hire them need not exist. Most aren't necessary. So what if they don't have employees? If the landscaping service which cuts the grass for my HOA didn't have staff, would that really be so bad?
Happy to have them, but let's not pretend we need them. And lets be honest too... lots of people don't even want them around. Is it really worth poking at them? I don't think so.
You know what people are saying?
Usually it's a waste of time. But not always.
I doubt my son living in CA and working as an engineer in tech is likely to start going out to pick lettuce if all the undocumented farm workers are deported. It is also unlikely that my other son living in NY and working in IT will be looking to start a new career working in landscaping, construction, or food processing. I sure hope the folks who want to deport 10-15 million undocumented people are also going to volunteer their children and grandchildren to do those tasks.
That’s the thing though. If no one already here is willing to take those jobs, (or they cannot be automated) there is little reason to believe the children and grandchildren of those who come here will either. Which means forever having to import more people.
Immigrants have been fulfilling this role for a few hundred years in this country, and typically, the children of those folks move on to better paying and more prestigious jobs, like maybe POTUS.
Past performance is no prediction of future returns. You can’t keep importing people and increasing the population forever.
KD, please be more clear about how "Job Demand" is calculated .