Wages Rise Amid 1 Million Self-Deportations Under Trump | Newsmax.com As i said in another thread yesterday, as this continues, the demand for a new immigration bill will grow louder. The previous bill is dead as parts of it are included in the Big Beautiful Bill. Tne new bill should contain changes in the H-2A and H-2B programs, increases in the number of temporary workers allowed in the country, and some protections to the DACA folks. Legal immigration will be the path moving forward to get more people into the US.
Seems highly optimistic but it could be under the right circumstances meaning the program must be revamped to meet our country’s economic needs. The current system including process, wait times, quotas, etc. leads to the illegal immigration we see. Our businesses/industries need the people and the people want to come so we should facilitate the two, not put up hurdles.
For those of us fluent in math, if lower income-earning people leave the country, average wages increase.
A lot of factual problems with that "analysis." Setting aside their laughable claims about self-deportation (and the underlying laughable notion that the federal government is deporting more when it is actually deporting less than it has in years- they are just doing so louder and less humanely (e.g., sending people to foreign prisons that haven't been convicted of anything, raiding Home Depots to pop numbers, staging big events to scare people and promote violence, etc.)), I'll focus on the nonsense wage claims. Wages have been increasing for years (certainly for the entire time after the pandemic). They are attributing wage gains this year to a decline in foreign workers when wages were surging much faster over the last four years than now. This is not surprising as we came out of the pandemic in a massive labor shortage. Wage Growth Tracker As you can see, wage growth, while still strongly positive, is actually down from its peak at the height of the pandemic recovery. Wage growth was in the 6% range for much of late 2022 and early 2023. It fell into the 5% range after that and has fallen into the 4% range over the last year, where it remains, towards the low end of the growth rate in the post-pandemic economy, at 4.3%. What is more interesting is if you look at wages by quartile. Out of the pandemic, when CIS is convincing you that immigrants showed up to suppress low-income wage gains, low income groups grew their income far faster than other groups. This effect has actually reversed, which, pretty much disproves their entire theory. So, for example, if we look at May, here are the 12-month average wage growth rates for Q1, the lowest income quartile (compared to overall): May 2021: 4.3% growth (compared to 3.4% overall) May 2022: 6.9% growth (compared to 5.0% overall) May 2023: 6.8% growth (compared to 6.3% overall) May 2024: 5.5% growth (compared to 5.2% overall) May 2025: 3.8% growth (compared to 4.4% overall) So their theory appears obviously wrong. Wage gains have slowed more sharply in markets that likely rely on low skill labor of questionable legal status. Which is all a very long way of saying exactly what Ora said. Newsmax and CIS: wow.
Look at Trump. Standing on the shoulders of giants https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?graph_id=590242&rn=461
True. Eliminating low wage jobs doesn't mean the rest of us are making higher wages. This of course is what happened during the pandemic, when more low wage earners dropped out. The wage metrics released by the government showed an increase in wages, but it was just that fewer low wage people were in the data.
Maybe slightly off-topic I recall years ago that organization was floating the myth that millions of illegal aliens were receiving public assistance. Adding that illegals are ineligible for virtually every form of public assistance they calculated their numbers by counting every member of a household in which there was at least one undocumented immigrant even if that person wasn't receiving any assistance, one example being a household with one illegal alien and a couple of American citizen children receiving reduced price or free lunches under the School Lunch Program. If it was a 4-person household every member was counted as an illegal receiving public assistance.
That was one of their big errors in calculating the cost of undocumented immigrants. The bigger one was using static scoring instead of dynamic scoring. For example, if there was an undocumented student in grade school (cost about $12k/year), CIS calculated the educational costs for this child for the rest of his/her life, even though grade-school lasts only 13 years (k-12) for most kids. Dynamic scoring not only takes this into account, but counts how much the average person makes in his/her life and how much that translates into tax receipts.
I’ll agree with your latter assessment and recommendation but proposing immigration reform has been poison for the right. Not sure if this will change things. Not surprised that lower end wages went up. That will also mean inflation, not just due to wage inflation but decrease is supply for things like farm grown fruits and vegetables and construction in general.
Ha, raise wages without the gulag flights and people are posting that McD’s in Maine or wherever that charges $25 to look at the menu. Raising wages means you starve!! Now, oh yeah, you eat too much anyway fatass!