One factor among many to keep in mind, when it comes to average wages for those in the working class, is the immigration factor. This is where it’s important to do immigration right, and use our immigration rates to our advantage, especially when looking at the larger economic picture.
If you do immigration right, it will benefit the economy, allowing it to grow in a healthy way, while still helping wages increase for workers. If you do immigration wrong, it could be detrimental to the working class, cause the supply of workers to be higher than the demand for workers, which lowers wages, and can result in high unemployment numbers, which is not good for the working class at all. So, immigration policies need to be kept in mind when thinking about keeping demand for workers higher than the supply of workers.
Besides, immigrants come to this country (the U.S.) for a better life than they had in their home country, so we should make sure the situation is set up to allow them to have that better life that they came here for. Right?
In my opinion, you want the demand for workers to be moderately higher than the supply of workers. If the demand for workers is much higher than a moderate demand, that can actually hinder economic growth, so you take care of that problem by increasing the immigration rate to reduce demand so that it is only moderate. And those immigrants contribute to the economy, by producing, and spending, which improves the economy even more. From this standpoint, the higher the economic growth, the higher becomes the demand for workers, which increases the need for immigrants, which contribute to even more economic growth, which feeds on itself, leading to even more need for even more immigrants, and if done right, can keep the demand for workers higher than the supply, which drives wages up. And that’s for long-time American citizens, as well as brand-new citizens who just came here as immigrants.
In my opinion, this is the only immigration standard that will be beneficial to both immigrants and workers. Anything else will fall flat on its face.
For more information on this strategy, and how it would work, then you need to read my article An Immigration Policy That Increases Workers’ Wages. In that article, I go into a more detail as to how we would accomplish this strategy.
