Illegal Alien Wages Collapse Under Open Borders

Increase supply and lower the price? Who'd have thunk it? Mass migration is now so out of control that even illegal aliens are seeing their wages collapse or are simply not being paid at all, because the person hiring them can find a new sucker the next day! And this isn't happening at the border where migration is always relatively high, but in far away places such as hipster neighborhoods in New York City.

This is not satire: Hipster would-be socialists are exploiting workers, thanks to Biden’s border disaster

On February 28, NBC News ran a piece captioned “Undocumented day laborers face harsh work prospects due to immigration spike”. As hard as it is to believe, neither the headline nor the video itself is satire.

The primary focus is on workers at the corner of Division and Marcy Avenues in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, known as La Parada, or “the stop”. The voiceover explains, “This is a place where immigrant women find a job for the day, primarily doing domestic work. Every day, up to 150 women wait here, bargaining for hourly pay that is often below minimum wage”.

Why, exactly, would workers bargain for pay that falls below the state and/or federal minimum? The video continues: “Often, these day laborers are undocumented”.

Here’s the problem, according to NBC News: “With more women looking for work, there is more competition. Desperate to find a job and with little to no English, many new arrivals don’t negotiate their rate.”

Increase supply and prices go down. This is basic economics. There is only one type of immigrant who immediately improves the economy: the super producer. The entrepreneur, the inventor, the business founder. Not someone who runs a convenience store or a restaurant, but a business that creates substantial new wealth. Productive people don't subtract from the economy and their children may become more productive, but they aren't making the average person better off unless there's a labor shortage, in which case adding labor can have an immediate positive impact. Less productive migrants are net negatives. They produce more GDP because they purchase basic necessities, but that money flows to corporations and the wealthy. They consume more welfare than they pay in taxes, sometimes substantially more. It adds more debt (inflation) into the economy and makes the average citizen worse off, the average worker far worse off because their effect on labor prices pulls everyone's wages down. Moreover, we can't ignore the raw numbers of immigrants. There aren't enough productive immigrants to cause problems such as overcrowding in schools. Low/no skill mass migration is the main driver of negative outcomes for ordinary Americans.

A high minimum wage is a terrible idea because many of these migrants can't produce enough economic output at a $15 minimum wage. What will happen is mass unemployment that drives up welfare costs, coupled with a large black market for sub-$15 an hour labor. The low living standards of American "minimum wage" workers was caused by three factors: feminism, mass immigration and offshoring. The first and third of those are over. Female labor force participation peaked already. Offshoring peaked. A growing desire for onshoring will reverse that trend soon enough, if wars and soaring transportation costs don't do it first. The last factor is more extreme than ever: open borders.

If you are not familiar with New York City or Williamsburg in particular, the neighborhood is rated as number one among “The 10 Most Hipster Neighborhoods on Earth” on Thrillist.

According to that outlet: “If hipsters have a mecca, it's most certainly Williamsburg. A world of bow ties, trilby hats, and suede chukka boots, where everyone's an amateur photographer with an unnecessarily expensive DSLR camera.”

Williamsburg is also extremely “progressive”, a blue enclave in a sea of blue in an area polling outfit FiveThirtyEight refers to as “The Elite Circles” (along with lower Manhattan), “the most progressive slice of the city”.

I trust that commuters are not traveling into La Parada from the more conservative environs (like Staten and Long Islands) looking for domestic help, so most of the would-be employers there are likely Williamsburg locals. It appears, then, that hipster would-be socialists are busy dickering for the cheapest, below-minimum wage workers whom they may or may not end up paying — a fact that speaks volumes.

Baizuo love to scream about $15 minimum wage, but I'm willing to bet the minimum wage in New York City could approach $20 an hour without mass immigration. Close the border and deport the illegal aliens, and watch wages soar. Imagine a person violently and gleefully stabbing a knife into the back of the American worker over and over while alternatively screaming "racist" at the worker and "Fight for $15" and you understand the mind of the modern Baizuo.