Friday, April 24, 2015

Economics 101

Basic micro-economics tells you that if demand remains essentially stable and supply increases, prices drop. Applied to labor, price = wages. A flood of 32 million illegal immigrants has oversupplied the market with labor, holding wages down for American workers. Liberals have denied immigrant wage-suppression.

Now The Washington Examiner reports the wage-suppression effects of immigration appear real.
The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service report studied immigration and middle class income from 1945-2013 and found that as immigration slowed between 1945 and 1970, American incomes increased.

But when immigration expanded, the incomes of the bottom 90 percent of Americans went flat and then dropped beginning in 2000.

In the report to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the CRS reported that the foreign-born population of the United States surged 324.5 percent, from 9,740,000 to 41,348,066, from 1970 to 2013.
COTTonLINE understands other factors have also influenced wage levels, including the offshoring of manufacturing and technical jobs.