Title 42, a pandemic emergency measure enacted by the Trump administration to deter illegal immigration, is set to expire on May 11, and the Biden administration expects rising crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border. American businesses may embrace this influx of immigrant labor with open arms because they often cite a persistent labor shortage as their top concern and insist they need immigrants to do the jobs Americans won’t do.
In a recent piece, Oren Cass at American Compass argues that American workers would do any job if the wages were high enough. He accuses greedy businesses and the availability of low-wage immigrant workers of causing decades of wage stagnation for American workers. Thus, he advocates for skill-based immigration reform to help American workers secure good-paying jobs. While some of his ideas make sense, others deserve scrutiny.
In “Jobs Americans Would Do,” Cass wrote, “From 1972 to 2022, real corporate profits per capita rose 185%. GDP per capita rose 141%. Productivity rose 135%. The average hourly wage for production and nonsupervisory workers rose 1%.” A similar assertion has been repeated before by The New York Times, CNBC, the Economic Policy Institute, and many others.
But such a claim is highly debatable. Allison Schrager, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, called the wage stagnation claims “misleading” because they “rely on the CPI-U (Consumer Price Index of Urban Consumers) measure of inflation … the CPI-U assumes larger inflation than the average household experiences … [and] makes stagnation seem worse than it is.”
Many studies about wage
