Sky-high legal immigration levels are hurting Colorado workers
Apparently, the law of supply and demand has stopped working in Colorado.
Colorado's unemployment rate has dropped to 3 percent — the lowest level since 2007. Normally, that would spur significant wage growth, as employers increase pay to attract scarce workers.
But real wages have been virtually stagnant since the Great Recession. Between 2009 and 2015, average hourly wages climbed 11 percent in Colorado. Inflation went up about 10 percent.
America's immigration policy bears much of the blame for this conundrum. Our immigration system grants work permits to roughly 1 million new [legal] foreign laborers each year. This never-ending supply of workers distorts the labor market and gives businesses little reason to boost pay or benefits for Colorado's employees.
Until policymakers take steps to lower immigration, local workers shouldn't hold their breath for big raises.
The immigration system doesn't reflect the nation's economic needs. Even as the job market tanked during the recession, the number of immigrants coming to the United States rose to historic highs. In 2008 and 2009, the economy shed over 8.3 million jobs, yet the government admitted 2.2 million new immigrants.
In the nearly seven years since the economic recovery officially began in 2009, the job market has been so weak that millions of Americans have given up even looking for work...
Yet over those same years, the country let in another 7 million legal immigrants, to say nothing of the legions who crossed the border illegally...
We are, of course, a nation of immigrants*...
But looking forward, it makes little sense to import millions more workers when the economy isn't even producing enough new jobs for those already here...
American workers deserve better than today's woefully misguided immigration policies.
Philip Prine is a licensed construction contractor in Louisville.
CAIRCO Research
- Illegal alien labor in the Colorado housing industry
- Economic costs of legal and illegal immigration
- How many illegal aliens reside in the United States?
- Population and Immigration Data, Projections and Graphs - Colorado
CAIRCO Notes
* America is not a nation of immigrants. Are you an immigrant? The vast open spaces of America were populated by America settlers, a few of whom were legal immigrants.
As Lawrence Auster explains in Huddled Cliches:
In reality, we are not—even in a figurative sense—a nation of immigrants or even a nation of descendants of immigrants. As Chilton Williamson pointed out in The Immigration Mystique, the 80,000 mostly English and Scots-Irish settlers of colonial times, the ancestors of America’s historic Anglo- Saxon majority, had not transplanted themselves from one nation to another (which is what defines immigration), but from Britain and its territories to British colonies. They were not immigrants, but colonists. The immigrants of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries came to an American nation that had already been formed by those colonists and their descendants. Therefore to call America “a nation of immigrants” is to suggest that America, prior to the late nineteenth century wave of European immigration, was not America. It is to imply that George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant (descended from the original colonists) were not “real” Americans...
Since every nation could be called a nation of immigrants (or a nation of invaders) if you go back far enough, consistent application of the principle that a nation of immigrants must be open to all future immigrants would require every country on earth to open its borders to whoever wanted to come. But only the United States and, to a lesser extent, a handful of other Western nations, are said to have this obligation. The rule of openness to immigrants turns out to be a double standard, aimed solely at America and the West.