IMMIGRATION AND WAGES. The anti-immigration movement makes a lot of hay out of Harvard economist George Borjas's estimate that immigration depresses wages for low-skill workers by 8%. I've always been surprised by how slight that number actually is, and how the the wage concerns of that specific demographic (high school drop-outs) seem relatively ignored by conservatives when they can't be turned against Hispanics, but whatever. Now, though, Bryan Caplan looks at the rest of the Borjas data, and muddles the picture even further:
So even in a study trumpeted by Mark Krikorian's virulently anti-immigrant "Center for Immigration Studies," the long-term wage impact is...zero. And most of the gains accrue to the middle class. And a long-term impact of zero, of course, obscures the massive gains both to immigrants, their families, and, through remittances, their home countries. Given numbers like that, it almost makes you wonder if the intense focus on shutting down the border is really about wage standards at all... --Ezra Klein
