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Comment by WhompingWindows | Hacker News Reader

How does this lead to wage stagnation? You've stated a potential piece of evidence but provided no reasoning to link to your (implicit) claim that immigration leads to stagnant wages. If that's not your claim, feel free to fill out the details.

Arguments have CER - claim, evidence, reasoning. Your comment was missing two.

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It's pretty obvious he meant that wages were suppressed due to supply and demand, where the immigration act increased the supply of labor. If you'd like proof of the act doing just that: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/imm...

Is that obvious that's what they meant? I understood it to mean that immigrants tend to earn less (I don't have this data myself), and could drag the average down. In that case the overall average real wage could stagnate while the average real wage of every cohort increased.

I don't think people need to spell out supply and demand every time they indicate that increasing the supply of something brings down prices.

In other words: yes, it is obvious.

The thing is, though, that while immigrants increase the supply of labor they're also consumers who increase the demand for labor. That's why you don't tend to see wages go down after exogenous immigration shocks like the Cuban boat lift in Miami. Well, non-English-speaking immigrants do actually tend to depress the wages of resident non-English-speakers somewhat but not the wages of English-speakers.

>The thing is, though, that while immigrants increase the supply of labor they're also consumers who increase the demand for labor.

Unless there is an increase in productivity, which if you read the article, would be apparent.

That is increase the labor supply while simultaneously increasing labor productivity and you will see a real drop in demand for laborers which is naturally going to result in a stagnation of wages. That is the extra demand created by the wave of low wage immigrants is more than made up with the increases in productivity in that same time period. Now you have a macro economy much more efficient at concentrating wealth.

How much immigrants are paid is primarily a function of how many immigrants are in the labor pool. They tend to earn less because there’s a virtually unlimited supply of poor people who want to immigrate. Supply and demand impacts markets for labor, that’s just basic economics.

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