Image: Flickr/U.S. Department of Agriculture
Non-college-educated U.S.-born workers have every reason to be enraged by declining wages and living standards, but more restrictive immigration policies won’t solve these problems.
In his 2016 article “Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers,” Harvard economist and right-wing darling George Borjas highlights an incident at a chicken processing plant in Georgia. “A decade ago,” he states, the plant “was raided by immigration agents, and 75 percent of its workforce vanished over a single weekend.” Unable to continue exploiting unauthorized immigrants, the company was forced to recruit Americans at higher wages. Borjas offers one way of interpreting this incident: low-skilled immigrants will work in worse conditions for lower pay, so limiting immigration would create better jobs for unskilled U.S. workers. This is a tempting view, popular even among policymakers; Borjas boasts that both Donald T