Inspired by the president, some Republican senators are pushing to cut immigration by half in order, they say, to boost workers’ wages
2018 and 2019 nominal wages rose by more than 3%, the fastest growth since before the recession a decade ago. Americans at the bottom of the labour market are doing especially well. In the past year the wages of those without a high-school diploma have risen by nearly 10%. Intriguingly, this has come as America has turned considerably less friendly to immigrants, who are assumed by many to steal jobs from natives and lower the wages of less-educated folk.
Many factors lie behind America’s growing wages. Labour demand is exceptionally high, with unemployment at 3.6%, giving some workers more bargaining power. Ambitious increases in state-level minimum wages in recent years have boosted the wages of the lowest earners. Nominal wages are rising not just in America but across rich countries—even though the foreign-born population in many of them continues to grow rapidly.
Restrictions on Chinese labourers were some of America’s earliest anti-immigration measures. Mary Coolidge, who wrote one of the world’s first studies of the effect of immigration on pay, could see no benefit to the expulsion. The perceived decline in wages in California which had motivated the reform, she argued in 1909, was “due to a number of causes with which Chinese competition had nothing to do.” Expulsion did little to raise earnings.
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