The Facts About Immigration
John Cassidy in the New Yorker focuses attention on an article presented at a recent Brookings conference. Co-authored by economists Gordon Hanson, Chen Liu, and Craig McIntosh, the paper was a subject of an ImmigrationProf blog post last week. It addressed immigration, particularly immigration by low-skilled workers from Mexico and other countries in Latin America. The basic message of the paper was that the political discussion about building a wall across the U.S.-Mexico border is at least a decade out of date. In the past ten years, the flow of undocumented immigrants entering the U.S. has slowed dramatically. And because many undocumented immigrants are either deported or move home every year, the total number living in the United States is currently falling at rate of about a hundred and sixty thousand a year. Consequently, the competitive pressure being placed on the wages of low-skilled American workers, who do similar jobs to low-skilled immigrant workers, is declining, the paper says. Indeed, many industries that employ a lot of low-skilled immigrant workers—such as agriculture, construction, and food services—are facing a potential shortage of labor.
KJ