Fewer Immigrants Mean More Jobs? Not So, Economists Say<br />The Trump administration on Wednesday embraced a proposal to sharply reduce legal immigration, which it said would preserve jobs<br />and lead to higher wages — the same argument advanced by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations half a century ago.<br />“The story that ‘when labor supplies go down, wages go up’ is a cartoon,” said Michael A. Clemens, an economist at the Center<br />for Global Development who has studied the end of the Mexican guest-worker program, which was known as the Bracero program.<br />“It’s mostly Asian, Indian, Chinese people who are coming to do mid- and high-level professional jobs.”<br />George J. Borjas, the Harvard immigration economist whose work is the only evidence<br />that the administration has cited as justifying its proposals, said in an interview on Wednesday that there was no economic justification for reducing skilled immigration.<br />“The average American worker is more likely to lose than to gain from immigration restrictions,”<br />said Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California, Davis.<br />The Trump administration is proposing sharp reductions in the number of skilled<br />and unskilled workers who are allowed to become permanent residents, halving annual immigration from the current level of roughly one million people a year.<br />“This legislation demonstrates our compassion for struggling American families who<br />deserve an immigration system that puts their needs first,” President Trump said.
