[Sir_Vival]

I'll give you a firm example. I'm close to a town of 20,000 in rural Minnesota, and the biggest employer is a well known turkey company. Their plants used to be staffed with primarily native (and being in Minnesota, white) people. It was menial, hard labor but it paid well because of that. By the 90s the plant was primarily staffed by illegal Mexican immigrants, and now it's almost entirely Somalians.

The jobs are repetitive, mindless, and it's cold, wet, and loud in there. The pay is barely above minimum wage. If the company didn't have access to those immigrants that are happy for any work at all, they would have been forced to raise those wages long ago. If people in the plant were paid, say, $15 an hour, the hourly workers in the office next door sure wouldn't be happy being paid the same amount. Their wages would have to be higher, which would mean the salaried folks would also want to be paid more.

That town is a perfect microcosm of how the massive amount of immigration our country has seen has kept wages stagnant.

[moorhosj]

You still haven't proven that immigration is the cause of this particular wage stagnation. You want to believe it is, but you haven't given evidence.

Is there proof that non-immigrants even want to do this work? The well-known case from Georgia suggests they don't. https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-...

At the same time, couldn't the state just raise the minimum wage?

[mixmastamyk]

He says they used to, but wages didn't keep up.

[moorhosj]

Immigration hasn’t kept up either, so how can it be the driver?

[mixmastamyk]

Why do you think it hasn’t kept up? Perhaps legal hasn’t. CA is a very different place than the one I grew up in.

[camgunz]

It's just as much the result of the lack of a meaningful minimum wage and reasonable labor standards. Another perfectly acceptable way to have fixed this would have been for Republicans to accept living wage and labor standards laws, and not have spent the last 40 some years waging war on unions.

I'll say it again. Study after study shows that immigration -- illegal or otherwise -- has very little effect on wages. Mechanization and "pro-business" policy is basically all of it.

[Latteland]

Except the problem with that story is that immigrantion is apparently lower now than ever, and the biggest problem is that many americans strongly prefer not to do that kind of work.

[paulie_a]

Why would the 15 an hour office workers care? And quite frankly if that makes them unhappy, they are free to find employment elsewhere. They were clearly fine with the pay previously, why should it matter what someone else is making. That just reaks of elitism