Lower wages: a feature of immigration, not a bug (March 2025 edition)

National Public Radio’s annotated “fact check” of Trump’s address to Congress last week included this gem (emphasis mine):

“Increased immigration — both legal and illegal — has helped to grow the labor force in recent years. It has allowed employers to keep adding jobs at a rapid clip without putting much upward pressure on prices, even as millions of baby boomers are retiring.”

Once upon a time, legacy media argued that running immigration at over a million people a year had no impact on wages despite what they teach in economics 101. Those days are refreshingly over. Immigration expansionists and their media explainers now celebrate lower wages — although they tend to use phrases like NPR’s “not putting much upward pressure on prices” — as a positive outcome of mass immigration. This was their argument for increasing immigration to fight inflation, and it is now their argument for allowing high levels of immigration (“both legal and illegal”) to continue.

Lower wages are a feature of immigration policy, not a bug (continued)

Ben Casselman, economic writer for the New York Times, 2023: “A smaller pool of workers makes it harder to rein in inflation because companies have to raise pay — and, most likely, prices — as they compete for workers….Increased immigration, if Congress were to allow it, could provide a new pool of potential workers.”

Senator Dick Durbin and Representative Jimmy Gomez, 2023: Durbin and Gomez supported expanding immigration because it would put downward pressure on wages and, to their minds, inflation. “Oh, most certainly,” said Durbin. “If there are more workers filling those jobs, it’s deflationary.” Gomez said “If you have more people that are allowed to work in this country, then there’s gonna be less of a tight labor market.”

The editorial board of the Washington Post (2022) argued that while rising wages and better benefits to workers were “welcome trends,” the president should “fix the legal immigration system” as a means to lower inflation.

Oren Cass, Executive Director, American Compass, 2022: “Expanding immigration, the actual theory here is, let’s find ways to suppress wages as a way of getting like, that’s the actual mechanism. And it doesn’t sound like such – the idea sounds less savvy if your idea is ‘hey let’s find ways to suppress wages to get out of this [inflation]’. Especially when you then have to admit that one of the consequences of immigration is suppressing wages.”

James Glynn and Miho Inada, reporting for the Wall Street Journal, 2021: “The ability of workers to secure outsize pay increases could depend on how quickly countries that have kept Covid-19 cases low can reopen their borders and encourage immigration. An influx of foreign labor would put downward pressure on wage growth.”

Cardiff Garcia, NPR host, 2020: “But very often, hiring American workers could require paying higher wages than the businesses would’ve paid to an immigrant.”

Tom Fairless, reporting for The Wall Street Journal, 2018: “…in places such as Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, supply and demand appear to be pushing up wages as labor becomes scarce….The wage increases are also putting pressure on Eastern European leaders – many of whom have called for stricter limits on immigration – to allow in more workers or risk lower future economic growth.”

Paula Dwyer, economist, 2016: “Their [immigrants’] presence in the labor market reduces the prices of child care, food preparation, house cleaning and construction for others.”

Former Senator Barbara Mikulski, 2015, on the need to expand immigration: “We want to ensure that employers who rely on the H-2B program are not forced to pay artificially-inflated wages that drive up costs to the point of putting them out of business.”

Rep. Paul Ryan, former House Budget Committee Chairman (and eventual Speaker of the House), 2013: “The dairy farm­ers in west­ern Wis­con­sin are hav­ing a hard time find­ing any­one to help them pro­duce their products, which are mostly cheese. If they can’t find work­ers, then they can’t pro­duce, and we’ll end up im­port­ing. The flip side of the ar­gu­ment is: Just raise wages enough to at­tract people. But you raise wages too much in cer­tain in­dus­tries, then you’ll get rid of those in­dus­tries, and we’ll just have to im­port.”

Mark Zandi, economist, 2016, according to The Washington Post, “explains that deporting undocumented immigrants would increase costs for employers, because they would have to compete for the workers remaining in the United States, causing wages to rise.”