So, in other words, there is evidence that it does have negative consequences?
I myself don't know either way. I just think that, if what you write is true, an impact at the low end of the salary spectrum isn't something to brush off as if it's nothing and doesn't count.
that effect is positive for businesses and consumers.
Second and perhaps more importantly, the more salaries are driven down, the less money those earners have to spend, which means businesses will see less potential revenue.
Honestly I think the statements I made are extremely simple.
Is it false that low-wage earners are also consumers?
Is it false that low-wage earners have less money to spend as consumers?
By the way, I'm asking these questions in earnest -- this isn't a debate to me, and I'm more than happy to "lose". I don't know much about this topic and would like to learn.
At the moment we have pretty good job growth combined with low unemployment so new people starting working aren't putting downward pressure on wages (evidence of this is that we are seeing wage growth).
Low wage earners are a huge chunk of the legal US population. After the government the next largest employer in the country is Walmart. Most of those people live outside major metros because at those wages it's not affordable to get housing in major metros.
I understand your city folk bubble, but I suggest you step out of it before spreading elitist rhetoric. Economies are complex systems which cause strong interdependence between cities and rural areas. The politics from both sides of the aisle of trying to injure their opponents is counter productive to the entire nation.
I apologize that my logic in support of open borders and extending the american jobs economy to immigrants has been construed as a Trump-esque attitude of "screw the [...] middle of the country"
For what it's worth, I am not on either side of an aisle, and am so disconnected from media that I have no idea how my perspective is in any way correlated to Trump's antithetical closed-borders policy. Please forgive my ignorance of that narrative.
This doesn't mean that open borders is a net negative policy, but it does have a tremendous negative impact on real people. That's something that needs to be considered seriously in the policy proposal and mitigated if possible. Hand-waving it away is basically the standard rhetoric of coastal city elites who don't give one iota of brain power for thinking about the "rubes in flyover states". Giving some effort to have empathy for every man, woman, and child in this country and how they're impacted by the policies we espouse, support, and advocate for is one way we can reduce the divisiveness of politics and heal our nation so we can move into a better future.