{"id":323,"date":"2006-04-05T15:02:22","date_gmt":"2006-04-05T21:02:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=323"},"modified":"2006-04-05T15:02:22","modified_gmt":"2006-04-05T21:02:22","slug":"the_wages_of_il","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=323","title":{"rendered":"The wages of illegal immigration"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t think you can give higher praise to a piece of writing than to say it forced you to reconsider your assumptions. That&#8217;s what <a href=\"http:\/\/news.ft.com\/cms\/s\/6962504e-c440-11da-bc52-0000779e2340.html\">Martin Wolf&#8217;s column<\/a> on the immigration debate did for me today. In particular, Wolf demolishes the argument that &#8220;immigrants are taking jobs that natives are unwilling to do&#8221; &#8211; an argument I&#8217;ve trotted out more than once recently. The supply of labor, he reminds us, directly influences the price of labor. By increasing supply, illegal immigration pushes down wages at the low end of the job scale &#8211; for everyone competing for those jobs.<\/p>\n<p>From there, Wolf connects the immigration issue with the issue of income inequality, a subject that concerns me greatly:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The opening of world trade is eliminating opportunities for production of labour-intensive tradeable goods and services in high-income countries. Employment of the native-born unskilled must increasingly be in non-tradeable activities. If unskilled immigrants drive down wages for such jobs, too, a hapless underclass will inevitably emerge. Does this matter? The answer depends on whether extreme inequality is compatible with successful democracy. The precedents suggest, instead, that it is a recipe for populism, plutocracy, or a miserable alternation between the two.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Damn. Now I have to think some more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t think you can give higher praise to a piece of writing than to say it forced you to reconsider your assumptions. That&#8217;s what Martin Wolf&#8217;s column on the immigration debate did for me today. In particular, Wolf demolishes the argument that &#8220;immigrants are taking jobs that natives are unwilling to do&#8221; &#8211; an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/323\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}