[dukeluke]

Logic. There are 11 million illegal immigrants in a country of about 300 million. Assuming around 7 million of those work & assuming 6 million of those work at or below minimum wage, that means that 2 percent of the population is probably underpaid. That doesn't sound like much until you consider that almost all of that 2 percent is working in some sort of manual labor, whether it's agriculture, construction or housework.

[denzil_correa]

If the logic is so sound, it should not be difficult to prove. So, I'd wait until you prove it via data and get accepted by an independent fora. Until then, this is one of the many plausible theories.

[newmanships]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_illegal_i...

Tl;Dr - wages for lower class/lower educated minorities are hurt, but employers gain an advantage (lower labor costs). There's also a paper by professor in econ from Cornell about African Americans suffering the most from it, but my phone won't link to the PDF.

Outside of academia you just have to go to your local home depot to see how much cheaper you can get someone to come work for you for the day, or go to any massage shop charging $25 / hour instead of $60+ while employing illegal immigrants.

[denzil_correa]

Thanks.

> while employing illegal immigrants.

It's important to note what the original claim of the parent comment was. It was not "illegal immigrants" but "uncontrolled immigration" which includes both legal AND illegal immigrants.

[newmanships]

In regards to legal immigrants there seems to be frequent discussions on HN about H1B visas and their effects.

Here's an article talking about them. http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2015/05/economists-h-1b-vi... (the direct link to the study is in there as well)

Edit: I should clarify - this isn't the only way to immigrate / cover all use cases, etc etc - just that in this & my first comment there does seem to be some wage suppression occurring in some forms related to various immigration.

[denzil_correa]

The parent comment also claims it is "artificial suppression". In fact, even if the H1B effects are said to be true - it seems the issue is not legal immigration but HOW the H1B visas are granted and to whom. This is entirely different than the implication of the parent comment which seems to suggest to halt immigration.

[newmanships]

(since I don't post much, not sure why I can't respond to your last comment)

However... what? > I could say the other way too. Immigration is not 100% uncontrolled, so it is controlled. However, what we do have is controlled immigration to a large degree and there are some uncontrolled immigration too. The ratio of controlled to uncontrolled is very high.

In 2015 1,051,031 people obtained lawful permanent residence (https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2015/tab...). Illegal immigrants are estimated at 1,201,000 for 2015 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_Uni...). Is that really the definition of controlled? The "ratio" you stated is completely inaccurate.

The original person was talking about people working for less than minimum wage (because they are illegal immigrants), so do they suppress wages for those jobs? Yes.

[newmanships]

Parent comment also is only referring to low-wage jobs so I suppose the entire H1B thing is irrelevant to the discussion. Not sure what you're looking for... you asked for a source - seems clear that yes, wages for some groups are "artificially suppressed" by "uncontrolled immigration". Is immigration uncontrolled? Yes immigration is not 100% controlled, hence illegal immigrants are a thing. I suppose you could argue that wages are suppressed "naturally" because of uncontrolled immigration if you want to argue about semantics in order to ignore the research that does show wages are suppressed.