That's what David Leonhardt asserted in a column that trashed Lou Dobbs for passing along ridiculous stories about how immigrants are damaging the country. While Leonhardt is right to go after mindless immigrant bashing, that should not be an excuse for a little economic slight of hand. Economists usually think that an increased supply of an item (e.g. less-educated workers) lowers its price (wage). There is now a large body of economic research that shows that raising the minimum wage has little effect on employment. This means that the demand for labor is relatively unresponsive to changes in wages, which would imply that a relatively small increase in the supply of less-educated workers through immigration would lead to large declines in wages. The work of George Borjas, a leading expert on immigration, shows wage declines of 7.0 percent, 1.3 percent and 0.5 percent for high school dropouts, high school graduates, and workers with some college, respectively, due to the flow of immigration from Mexico between 1980 and 2000. While Borjas's assessment is disputed by other economists, it is a bit of slight of hand to assert that everyone other than high school dropouts have benefited from immigration.
--Dean Baker
