Lower migration is driving up blue-collar wages, and those extra wages are stabilizing the U.S. economy, says the Economist magazine, which serves as a community newspaper for globalist elites.
The admission of rising prosperity comes in a sour-toned February 13 article, and is buried under multiple warnings about future disasters:
There are nonetheless scraps of evidence that some workers are benefiting from America’s growing antipathy to immigrants. Gordon Hanson of Harvard University suggests that if the impact of reduced low-skill migration is showing up anywhere, it will be in three particular occupations: housekeepers, building-and-grounds maintenance workers, and drywall installers. These occupations rely heavily on immigrant labour and the services they provide cannot be traded internationally. Average wages in those occupations are rising considerably faster than wages in other low-paid jobs, according to calculations by The Economist.
The Economist article is headlined “Delayed reaction: Immigration to America is down. Wages are up.”
It provides more good news — that President Donald Trump’s Hire American policy is even boosting wages in the Midwest:
Intriguing evidence also shows up geographically. According to research by William Frey of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, five big metro areas saw absolute declines in their foreign-born populations in 2010-18. Wages in those areas are now rising by 5% a year, according to our calculations. Cleveland, which is in one such area, has pockets of severe poverty but seems to be doing better than before. Many of the city centre’s astonishingly grand buildings are being converted into luxury lofts for millennials.
The Economist article ends with a dour warning: “The Trump administration’s immigration restrictionism may achieve a temporary boost in wages of the low-paid now, but at a cost to the country’s future prosperity.”
But even the warnings were full of good news about how higher wages are forcing companies to invest in the labor-saving machinery which allows Americans to get more work done in less time:
In the short term, native workers may well see a wage boost as labour supply falls. But businesses then reorient production towards less labour-intensive products; natives take jobs previously occupied by foreign-born folk, which may be worse paid; and bosses invest in labour-saving machinery, which can reduce the pay of remaining workers.
If the Economist is correct, Americans will get new robots in their factories, cow milking machines on their farms, and job offers from Silicon Valley firms and New York restaurants.
The first term success by Trump — and by the voters who put him into office — is torture for pro-migration groups who have long insisted Americans somehow gain when migrants swell the number of jobs in the economy by entering U.S. job sites and housing markets.
But an increasing number of experts are grudgingly admitting a reduction in migrants boosts Americans’ average wages, the government’s tax receipts, and politicians’ reelection votes.
The pro-American lesson has been admitted by independent academics, the National Academies of Science, the Congressional Budget Office, executives, more academics, New York Times reporters, state officials, unions, more business executives, lobbyists, employees, the Wall Street Journal, federal economists, Goldman Sachs, oil drillers, Wall Street analysts, fired professionals, legislators, construction workers, New York Times subscribers, Robert Rubin, and even by the Bank of Ireland.
The Economist also published a second February 13 article admitting Trump’s “Blue Collar Boom” is powering the economy through routine dips and dives:
AT 128 MONTHS and counting, America’s economic expansion is the longest on record. Longevity has not come easily. The expansion trundled along despite global manufacturing downturns in 2016 and 2019, conflicts over trade, and a bout of monetary tightening by the Federal Reserve. The recovery ploughed ahead last year even as business investment decelerated and residential-construction investment shrank, thanks to rock-steady growth in personal consumption. The durability of spending is a testament to one of this expansion’s more unusual features: faster growth in wages for workers at the bottom of the income distribution than for high earners. Improved fortunes for low-wage workers may, it seems, be an underappreciated contributor to the sustainability of economic booms.
The wages gained by blue-collar Americans will help avoid another disastrous 2008 crash, says the Economist:
The recent recovery looks very different from the pattern established in the 1990s and 2000s. From 2014 to 2018 pay in low-wage industries grew about as quickly as that in other parts of the economy, according to a recent analysis by economists at Indeed Hiring Lab, a labour-market research group. And over the past two years wage growth at the bottom has been substantially faster than that in better-paying industries (see chart). Rising pay for low earners has put more cash in the hands of those most likely to spend, supporting consumption and helping the economy weather a soft patch.
In the early 2000s, GOP President George W. Bush raised immigration levels, lowered wages, and cut interest rates. That mixture produced a housing boom as many migrants bought houses. But their wages were too low go pay their mortgages once the economy dipped in 2007, ensuring a massive economic crash, the Economist said.
The Economist is a pro-globalist publication that favors companies and investors, and so it supports the mass migration of unskilled and skilled workers into the United States and Europe. Its recognition that reduced migration can benefit a nation’s citizens and their economy is a notable win for Trump’s populist voters.
But the Economist articles said little about the huge level of white-collar immigration into the United States, which has devastated college graduate careers and salaries from New York to California:
The number of highly qualified immigrants continues to rise. San Francisco airport remains just as crammed with Allbirds-and-gilet-wearing tech investors from all over the world.
So far, American graduates have yet to see any cutback in white-collar migration, or a boom from Trump’s Hire American, pro-American economic policies.