The estimable Chris Hayes writes:
There are few things that irk me more than when conservatives advocate for increased immigration for low wage workers by saying that immigrants do jobs that Americans don't want. I don't want to buy a slice of pizza for $45. It doesn't mean I don't like pizza! I'm not particularly interested in writing a book for the total payment of $9. It doesn't mean I don't want to write a book!
Raise. The. Wages. You'll find plenty of workers. I promise.
That's true so far as it goes. The problem is the other end of it: Nobody wants to buy your book for $60, or eat your pizza for $45, or purchase your strawberries for $7.99 a pound. So the issue, in almost all these cases, is how much you can raise wages without decimating the industry in question. In some industries, that's no problem. People pay a lot to go to the doctor. In some industries, it is a problem. If we weren't importing strawberry-pickers, we'd be importing strawberries. If it cost $500 to get your house cleaned, people would just clean their own homes.
Global competition makes all this harder, particularly when you're not talking about service industries. Raise wages here, and we'll often import the good rather than the labor. The forces and incentives that drive a company to make their goods in China -- cheaper labor, mainly -- are the very same ones that drive them to hire immigrant labor domestically. The two strategies are different sides of the same coin.
Sadly, I have no answers to the issues these issues -- nor the empirical data to know how much can be done to raise wages, and where. We're not closing our borders to goods, and I don't think we should close them to people, either. In some of these industries, we can simply lift the wages because the employers can't run their companies from China -- think construction, some sectors of agriculture, much meatpacking -- and in some we simply don't know how to handle the forces of global competition, the Wal-Martization of prices, etc. But raising the wages isn't as broad an answer as it used to be. Back before inter- and intra-continental transport was essentially trivial, you paid higher wages or you closed. Now, in most industries, there's this third option -- you get cheaper labor elsewhere -- and it's just not clear how you restore worker bargaining power so long as that exists.
