EDIT: I know the topic of immigration can evoke strong emotions. I’m just pointing out that a decrease in labor pool ought to increase wages. Isn’t this just law of supply/demand?
>Tom Deardorff has had to compete for workers. He's raised their pay by actually quite a lot. Back in 2006, working the celery field paid about $8.70 an hour. Now it pays more than $21 an hour. [...] Tom says his workers all are documented and that even doubling wages hasn't solved the labor problem.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2018/05/03/607996811/worker-shortage-hur...
If that causes celery prices to rise so high that no one wants to buy it, then maybe celery just isn't an economically viable crop.
It works this way if you consider a terrible work environment to be negative wage.
For jobs that hover around minimum wage because of low margins labor shortages mean better working conditions.
For example, if you toss a "must be able to piss clean" requirement on any job that doesn't require the employee to have the sunk cost of years of training and it adds about 50% to the effective hourly wage.
Another example would be university wages. Many departments can only afford work-study student workers. When you need work-study student workers with more than just a pulse you have to treat them better because most students would rather work for dining services and do an equally terrible job with free food.
The problem is that at a state/national level there's so much feedback delay, immigration is not evenly distributed, etc, etc that you can't extrapolate
I’m not advocating a position on immigration itself. Just stating one possible consequence of curtailing immigration.
A claim was made that constricting immigration will not lead to increased wages. I think this is contrary to how it normally works and thus the person making that claim ought to show why it's true. Let's turn it around, why don't you show the reverse of what you ask me?
I'm not an economist. I merely asked a question and sought input as to why labor prices wouldn't increase. I think you are reading too much into what I wrote. I'm strongly in favor of immigration. I'm a union member and I think labor laws are far too lax in the U.S. I think immigration would not be an issue if we had strong labor laws that were enforced. But we don't have those laws and thus people blame immigration for their woes.
But whatever one believes with regard to immigration it's extremist to think that there are no negative consequences of immigration and it's extremist to think there are no positive consequences of immigration.
From [1]:
For some subperiods and groups, the effects are positive or zero, but the most common result is that a 1 percentage point increase in the fraction of the population that is foreign-born reduces wages from 1.0–1.6 percent.
It's worth pointing out that the paper mentions that calculating the true impact is hard and controversial so who knows if the above is correct?