The New York Times editorial board published a scathing review of proposed GOP immigration legislation Monday, in which they concede economic productivity is so complex that economists struggle to understand it, and then confidently assert that increased immigration would lead to increased productivity.
The editorial board casts Trump’s support for the bill that would cut legal immigration in half as an ill advised political nod to his base, made without considering the bill’s economic implications. The board’s logic is dubious at times, in particular about halfway through the piece in this paragraph:
“Moreover, as studies have repeatedly shown, immigration boosts productivity and economic growth; restricting it would have the opposite effect. Productivity in recent decades has been growing more slowly than in the past for reasons that economists do not fully understand. The labor force is also growing slowly as baby boomers retire. Restricting immigration would reinforce both trends.”
The editorial board admits here the difficulty involved in isolating the degree to which individual factors effect economic productivity, but nonetheless states confidently that increased immigration is a consummate boon to productivity.
The editorial quickly dismisses the idea that high levels of unskilled immigrant labor depresses wages for the least educated and economically advantaged Americans.
“The issue of immigration in America is volatile and complex and thus vulnerable to seductive promises. This bill falls into that category. Its central premise — that it would help American workers — is false. It’s true that an influx of workers can cause short-term disruptions to the labor market, but the impact on the wages of native workers over a period of 10 years or more is ‘very small,’ according to a comprehensive National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report published last year.”
Despite the board’s best attempts to cast the effect of immigration on low wage workers as an open and shut case, however, economists in fact remain divided on the issue. One study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, for example, found that “As immigrants disproportionately increased the supply of workers in a particular skill group, the wage of black workers in that group fell, the employment rate declined, and the incarceration rate rose.”
The 2006 study examined census data taken between 1960 and 2000. These findings demonstrate that the negative effects of increased immigration on low wage workers persist over time, contradicting the editorial boards’ claim that the effects dissipate after a decade.
Granted, there are certainly a host of factors which impacted black employment and wage growth over the examined period. This complexity is an inescapable reality that persists because of the inherent difficulty of controlling for the effects of immigration on economic indicators. The matter is certainly not as open and shut as the editorial suggests.
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