Will illegal immigration offset a wage hike?

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An incentive to legalize
Jared Bernstein, a former Clinton administration official who is now at the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank that supports an increase in the minimum wage, said the worry about illegal immigrants undermining wages of lower-skilled Americans is “not an unreasonable concern.”

And, he added, “It’s one of the reasons why for many of us, immigration reform seems like a pretty important problem, added to the idea of a minimum wage change. The more you bring undocumented workers out of the shadows and into the legal labor market, the more you preclude exactly that kind of incentive. Whether it’s the minimum wage or not, employers exploiting undocumented workers by not paying them the minimum — either today’s rate or a higher rate.”

Lofgren said, “To the extent that some economists worry that the underground economy impacts adversely American workers, it’s important that workers who are here temporarily not be exploited. Because that’s not only unfair to them, it’s not fair to Americans. So a comprehensive immigration approach is important to American workers, but so is the minimum wage.”

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For most Democrats the phrase “comprehensive immigration reform” means deterring illegal immigrants and those who hire them, but also legalizing the illegal immigrants who are already living in the United States.

“There has to be enforcement at the border, there has to be enforcement at the workplace, but there also has to be an immigration system that meets the needs of families who want to be unified, and the needs of the American economy, to the extent that we are unable to meet the needs of our workforce with our own population,” Lofgren said. “We need to be realistic about how we move people in to become new Americans to help us meet those needs.”

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On the other side of the aisle, a key legislator will be Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, who said last week that immigration reform is “the single most important domestic priority. It was a mistake that we in the (Republican) majority last year failed to deal with it, and I think we paid a price for that” in last November’s elections.

Dealing with those already here
“The hardest issue still is going to be how to deal with the 12 million (illegal immigrants living in the United States),” Cornyn said. “My position is we don’t repeat the mistake we made in 1986, where we traded an amnesty for enforcement and we got an amnesty and no enforcement.”

Cornyn said a trade-off is possible: If Congress enacts stringent border and worksite enforcement, then, he said, “The American people would be far more generous about how we deal with the 12 million (illegal immigrant) people.”

In any event, Wednesday’s House vote on the minimum wage is only the beginning chapter of an economic story that unfolds over the next year as Congress tries to solve the immigration dilemma.

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