Friday, February 14, 2020

INVESTORS' REPORT ADMITS FLORIDA E-VERIFY RAISES WAGES FOR LEGALS - NO WONDER THE DEMOCRAT PARTY IS HELL BENT ON BLOCKING IT



Investors’ Report Admits Florida E-Verify Prods Employers to Raise Wages

MIAMI BEACH, FL - SEPTEMBER 25: Reluss Williams (L) and other construction workers install a drainage pipe that will be attached to a water pump station being built by the City of Miami Beach in the street on September 25, 2014 in Miami Beach, Florida. As climate change brings higher …
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
7:57

Florida’s E-Verify bill will likely push 140,000 illegals out of Florida jobs and make it difficult for employers to hire replacement workers at current wages, says a university study funded by the investors who are trying to block the E-Verify bill.
If “existing undocumented workers were to exit the Florida economy in the number anticipated were E-Verify were [sic] to be adopted, the adequate numbers of native workers would not be available at current wage rates,” says the draft report funded by FWD.us, an advocacy group for billionaire investors, including Mark Zuckerberg.
“This is basically making the case for us that employers are employing illegal workers to keep wages low and to increase their own profits,” said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations at NumbersUSA. “If they can’t replace those workers at the same [pay] level, then, oh my gosh, then they are going to have to increase wages [for Americans]. … It is exactly what should happen.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R) proposed E-Verify bill would penalize companies that hire illegals. A narrow version has passed one committee vote, but business groups will try to kill the bill before it can get to DeSantis’s desk.
The biggest winners from the E-Verify bill would be the least paid, least educated workers in the economy, said the study by Rick Harper, an economist formerly at the University of West Florida. “Those are the most likely to be substituted by employers hiring new workers when there is some competition” from illegal workers, wrote Harper, who now works with Triumph Gulf Coast Inc. to invest public funds in Florida.
The law would also help narrow the income gap between the least educated and better educated workers, said the FWD.us report. The current shortage of workers already “has reduced the size of the difference in wages paid to less-educated workers versus well-educated workers … by 6 to 9 percent,” Harper wrote.
Already, President Donald Trump’s zig-zag opposition to corporate migration is forcing companies to raise wages and boost the training of sidelined and unskilled American workers. For example, Fox News described February 13 how Florida’s construction industry is reacting to a claimed shortage of cheap workers by training unskilled Americans:
Dan Kodsi is the C.E.O. and developer of Paramount Miami Worldcenter, the world’s most heavily amenitized luxury residential tower.  It’s currently the biggest private construction project in America. He told us the immigration crackdown “has actually created a void, we have more construction jobs available than we actually have workers.”
Paramount Miami Worldcenter is taking full advantage of [federal training] programs, and Kodsi has partnered with the City of Miami to recruit and train hundreds of unemployed workers. The hope is to provide enough construction crews for the Miami area for years to come. “At Miami Worldcenter, we actually have a jobs program,” says Kodsi. “This is a public-private partnership where we created vocational schools where we can take unskilled workers, these workers can come in and gain skills.”
The expanded hiring and training of sidelined Americans has saved construction firms from a real shortage of workers, according to federal pay data. Real shortages are revealed by bidding wars among employers and by rising wages for Americans, but the federal data shows little improvement in wages for construction workers:
The bill makes sense for incumbent politicians because they gain more from rising wages than from happy donors, said Jenks. “They can’t win an election without votes, regardless of how much money they have, and if you can get more voters with fewer campaign dollars, you will win because you have the votes.”
Some business lobbyists admit that rising wages are a boon for politicians. “Are rising wages good for national politics?” Breitbart News asked January 9 during the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s annual State of American Business event.
“You’re damn right they are,” responded Tom Donohue, CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, adding:
They are good for national politics if you’re a politician, for sure. And it’s good for national politics if you want people to feel more engaged in the healthy part of the economy and go out and vote to keep it that way. If you look the other side of your question: ‘Are decreasing wages good for national politics?’ Hell, no.
If you have ten people for every job, you’re not gonna have a drive [up] in wages. [But] if you have five people for every ten jobs, wages are going to go up.”
DeSantis’s support for American employees is helping to push up his polling support before his 2022 reelection, Jenks noted. “I know Democrats in Florida who voted for Dasantis because of his position,” she said.
The same trend is boosting Trump in the 2020 election campaign, she said. “I think we can look at Trump and see the answer to that … he is extremely popular, and this is what he is talking about.”
Business groups often argue that laws against illegal migration will shrink the economy — and government tax revenues — by reducing hiring, consumption, and real estate prices.
But the exclusion of illegals also tends to push up tax receipts, wages, and training for voters, according to studies and statements by independent academics, the National Academies of Science, the Congressional Budget Officeexecutivesmore academicsNew York Times reportersstate officialsunionsmore business executiveslobbyists, employees, the Wall Street Journalfederal economistsGoldman Sachsoil drillersWall Street analystsfired professionalslegislatorsconstruction workers, New York Times subscribers, plus Robert Rubin, and even the Bank of Ireland and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) before 2019:

Bernie Sanders in 2007: I believe we have very serious immigration problems in this country. I think, as you've heard today, sanctions against employers who employ illegal immigrants is virtually nonexistent. Our border is very porous.

1,979 people are talking about this

The Harper report predicts that the departure of illegals will reduce spending on retailers, food, rents, and housing.
But that loss will be offset by greater spending from Americans, Jenks said. “If you are putting money in illegals’ pockets, they’re likely to spend that money outside of the country — which illegals do. [But Americans] are more likely to spend in the local economy and to rent [an apartment] or buy a place to live, so I don’t see how it would not be a win for Florida.”
Harper’s report for FWD.us includes many references to the rule of supply and demand. The Economics 101 rule predicts that any reduction in the supply of foreign workers will force employers to raise wages for local and legal employees:
“Business that currently employ significant number sof undocumented workers may face increased labor costs,” says the draft report, which is being prepared by FWD.us for publication.
“At a time of tight labor markets and record low unemployment, diminishing the size of the available labor pool will predictably result in negative and costly repercussions for business,” says the 27-page report.
“In today’s tight labor market, it is unlikely that the workforce lost due to the implementation of mandatory E-verify would be replaced without driving up production costs,” according to the report, which was commissioned by FWD.us in November 2019 in response to DeSantis’s push for legislation that would reduce the hiring of illegal migrants.
“It is unlikely that many of the jobs made vacant by undocumented workers departing Florida would be filled at current wages,” said the report by the investor group, which includes many investors with interest in myriad companies, including real estate and transport firms.

U.S. investors denounce Pres. Trump's 'Public Charge' immigration reform -- which will deny them extra consumers & workers, & will shrink taxpayers' spending on medical & welfare programs used by poor & sick migrants.
Money explains much about migration.http://bit.ly/2RF87mo .

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EconomyImmigrationPoliticsconstructione-verifyFloridaFWD.usMigrantsRon DeSantissalariesSupply and demandwages


No Labor Shortage: 11M Americans Out of Work, but All Want Full-Time Jobs

Scott Olson/Getty Images
 10 Jan 20201,070
2:53
There remain more than 11 million Americans who are out of work but want full-time jobs, despite claims by corporate interests and the big business lobby of a so-called “labor shortage.”
The latest unemployment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals there is still slack in the labor market for disenfranchised Americans to enter the workforce rather than business bringing foreign workers to the U.S. to take jobs.
Overall, about 5.8 million Americans are unemployed — 12.6 percent of whom are teenagers who generally seek entry-level jobs and 5.9 percent of whom are black Americans. These nearly six million unemployed also include about 1.2 million Americans who are considered “long-term unemployed” because they have been out of work for more than six months.
Another 4.1 million Americans are working part-time jobs but want full-time employment. Additionally, 1.2 million Americans are out of the labor force entirely after looking for a job sometime within the last year. These marginally attached Americans are available for work and want full-time jobs.
Roughly 277,000 of the 1.2 million Americans out of the labor force completely are considered “discouraged workers” because they do not believe there are jobs in the labor market for them.
In total, about 11.1 million Americans are either unemployed, out of the labor force, or underemployed; however, all have said they want good-paying, full-time jobs.


The constant cry from corporate lobbyist @USChamber and "newsplainer" @voxdotcom is that America is "running out of workers." If that were true there wouldn't be people to come off the sidelines and take jobs.





While Americans have enjoyed significant wage growth in Trump’s economy for blue-collar and working-class Americans, corporate interests have increasingly suggested that the U.S. must continue importing millions of foreign workers every year to fill jobs.
In April 2019, former Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue said the U.S. needed more legal immigration because the country is “out of people.”
Extensive research by economists like George Borjas and analyst Steven Camarota has found that the country’s current legal immigration system — wherein 1.2 million mostly low-skilled workers are admitted annually — burdens U.S. taxpayers and America’s working and middle class while redistributing about $500 billion in wealth every year to major employers and newly arrived immigrants.
Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, has found that every one percent increase in the immigrant composition of American workers’ occupations reduces their weekly wages by about 0.5 percent. This means the average native-born American worker today has his weekly wages reduced by perhaps 8.5 percent because of current legal immigration levels.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder

CBO: Immigration Has ‘Negative Effect on Wages’

NEIL MUNRO
9 Jan 2020230
7:01
Immigration makes all of America richer, but it can make some Americans poorer, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says in a report issued January 9.
“Immigration, whether legal or illegal, expands the labor force and changes its composition, leading to increases in total economic output,” said the non-partisan report, titled “The Foreign-Born Population and Its Effects on the U.S. Economy and the Federal Budget—An Overview.”
But this national expansion does “not necessarily [deliver] to increases in output per capita,” or income per person, the report said:
For example, business leaders say the nation’s enormous population of immigrants has expanded the nation’s workforce, increased consumption, and driven up housing prices. But that inflow has also shrunk the wages of less-educated Americans, the report said:
Among people with less education, a large percentage are foreign born. Consequently, immigration has exerted downward pressure on the wages of relatively low-skilled workers who are already in the country, regardless of their birthplace.
The CBO report contradicts business claims that a bigger economy ensures bigger wages for everyone.
More ominously, the report also suggests that the American middle-class — including millions of young college graduates — may suffer a similar economic disaster if immigration policy is shifted to raise the inflow of foreign college graduates. The report says:
The effects of immigration on wages depend on the characteristics of the immigrants. To the extent that newly arrived workers have abilities similar to those of workers already in the country, immigration would have a negative effect on wages.
Many business advocates in Washington are calling for a dramatic increase in “high-skilled immigration” — meaning foreign college graduates who would compete for the same jobs as American college graduates. For example, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) is trying to pass his S.386 bill that offers the prize of renewable work-permits — and eventual citizenship — to an unlimited number of foreign graduates.
Each year, up to 120,000 foreign graduates — and their spouses and children — can get green cards via their employer’s sponsorship, even as perhaps 800,000 Americans graduate from college with skilled degrees.
But Lee’s bill creates a new legal status called “Early Adjustment.” This status would allow an uncapped number of college graduate migrants to apply for renewable work permits long before they can get a green card to become a legal immigrant and citizen.
Existing law allows an uncapped number of foreigners to legally get short-term work permits and jobs after enrolling in U.S. colleges. The migrants can get jobs by first paying tuition to a university, and then getting short-term work permits via the uncapped “Curricular Practical Training” and the “Optional Practical Training” programs. These workers must leave the United States after a few years until they enroll themselves in work permit programs.
But Lee’s bill would remove any caps on this foreign worker population by allowing an unlimited number of foreign workers to get “Early Adjustment” status from their employers.


DHS posts videos of Indian migrants buying fake documents from ICE's Farmington U. sting operation.
The 
#OPT Optional Practical Training program is an estb.-run labor-trafficking scheme to sideline American graduates.
It will expand if 
#S386 becomes law http://bit.ly/39H2Zqh 

Watch: ICE Lure and Sting Indian Illegal Labor 'OPT' Traffickers



Many migrants already use the CPT and OPT work permits to get jobs and to also compete for entry into the H-1B visa worker program. Once in the H-1B program — which accepts 85,000 new workers each year — many of the migrants also ask their employers to sponsor them for green cards.
The sponsorship allows them to stay working in the United States until they eventually get their valuable green card, long after their temporary visas have expired. Congress has not set an annual limit on the number of visa workers who can be sponsored for green cards, so the resident population of permanent “temporary workers” is growing fast — and is helping to suppress wages for American graduates.
Roughly 1.5 million foreign visa workers hold white-collar jobs throughout the U.S. economy. This number includes at least 750,000 Indians who are allowed to work via the supposedly temporary CPT, OPT, L-1, and H-1B visa programs. Roughly 300,000 of these Indians — plus 300,000 family members — are being allowed to stay in the United States because they asked their employers to sponsor them for green cards.
The CBO report shows that immigrants comprise roughly 40 percent of the population of people who did not graduate from high school  — and that immigrants already comprise roughly 20 percent of all people with a “graduate degree.”
Congressional Budget Office
The 20 percent share likely would quickly rise if the Senate approves Lee’s S.386 plan — and that rise could sharply reduce salaries for American college graduates.
“Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent” as the extra workers compete for jobs, says George Borjas, a labor economist at Harvard. That extra labor does expand the economy — but that expansion is dwarfed by the transfer of the wage reductions to investors, he wrote in 2016:
I estimate the current “immigration surplus”—the net increase in the total wealth of the native population—to be about $50 billion annually. But behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners [mostly employers] is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year.
“In low-skilled occupations, a one percent increase in the immigrant composition of an individual’s occupation reduces wages by [0].8 percent,” said a 1998 report by the Center for Immigration Studies.
A 2013 CBO report predicted that the 2013 “Gang of Eight” amnesty and immigration bill would reduce the share of income that goes to wage earners and increase the share that goes to investors. “Because the bill would increase the rate of growth of the labor force, average wages would be held down in the first decade after enactment,” the CBO report said.
But all that cheap labor would boost corporate profits and spike the stock market, the report said. “The rate of return on capital would be higher [than on labor] under the legislation than under current law throughout the next two decades,” says the report, titled “The Economic Impact of S. 744.”
Business leaders sometimes admit that an extra supply of workers forces down wages. “If you have ten people for every job, you’re not going to have a drive [up] in wages,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue told Breitbart News on January 9. But “if you have five people for every ten jobs, wages are going to go up.”


Are rising wages good for national politics?
“You’re damn right they are,” US Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue said, adding: "They are good for national politics if you’re a politician, for sure."
http://bit.ly/2FwwCg7 

U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Rising Wages Are Good for Politicians

 

 

Claims of a Labor Shortage Are Just Not True


America's September unemployment rate fell to 3.5 percent, the lowest level since 1969, according to the most recent Department of Labor report.
The tight labor market is forcing companies to hire disadvantaged Americans. For example, New Seasons Market, a West Coast grocery chain, is actively recruiting people with disabilities and prior criminal records. Similarly, Custom Equipment, a Wisconsin manufacturing firm, recently hired several prison inmates through a work-release program and intends to employ them full-time upon their release.
For the first time in decades, these disadvantaged Americans are finally winning significant pay increases. Over the past year, the lowest-paid 25 percent of workers enjoyed faster wage growth than their higher-paid peers.
Unfortunately, this positive trend could be short-lived. Corporate special interests are whining about a labor shortage -- and are spending millions to lobby for higher levels of immigration, which would supply companies with cheap, pliable workers.
Hardworking Americans need their leaders in Washington to see through this influence campaign and stand up for their interests. Scaling back immigration would further tighten the labor market, boosting wages and helping the most disadvantaged Americans find jobs.
The U.S. economy is the strongest it has been in years. Employers added 136,000 new jobs in September, marking 108 months of consecutive job growth.
But there's still more progress to be made. Approximately 6 million Americans are currently looking for jobs but remain unemployed. Another 4 million desire full-time positions but are underemployed as part-time workers. Millions more, feeling discouraged about their bleak prospects, have abandoned the job search altogether. Indeed, among 18 through 65-year-olds, 55 million people aren't working.
Many of these folks have limited or outdated skills. Others have criminal records or disabilities. So they might require a bit more training than traditional job applicants.
Rather than put in this extra effort, some big businesses want to eliminate their recruiting challenges by importing cheap foreign workers. These firms have instructed their lobbyists to push for more immigration, which would introduce more slack into the labor market.
The CEO of the Chamber of Commerce recently claimed that America needs a massive increase in immigration because we're "out of people." Chamber officials said their lobbying efforts would center on sizeable increases to rates of legal immigration.
The National Association of Manufacturers, meanwhile, recently released a proposal which would effectively double the number of H-1B tech worker visas, import more seasonal low-skilled laborers on H-2A and H-2B visas, and grant amnesty to illegal immigrants.
And the agriculture industry is lobbying for a path to legalization for illegal laborers and is seeking to expand "temporary" guest-worker programs to include stable, year-round positions on dairy farms and meatpacking plants -- jobs that Americans will happily fill for the right wage. The Association of Builders and Contractors, Koch Industries, and dozens more companies have called for similar measures.
There are already 45 million immigrants in the United States -- 28 million of which are employed -- and counting. More than 650,000 people crossed into the United States illegally in the past eight months alone, already exceeding last fiscal year's totals. And the U.S. government grants an additional 1 million lifetime work permits to immigrants every year.
Those figures will skyrocket even higher if business groups get their way. Such an expansion would hurt hardworking Americans.
The majority of foreigners who cross the border illegally or arrive on guest worker visas lack substantial education. Naturally, they seek out less-skilled jobs in construction, manufacturing, agriculture, and service -- and directly compete with the most economically vulnerable Americans. The labor surplus created by immigration depresses the wages of native-born high school dropouts up to $1,500 each year.
Several proposals under consideration in Washington could alleviate American workers' woes.
A recent bill from Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) would mandate all businesses use a free, online system called E-Verify, which determines an individual's work eligibility in mere seconds.
The system would make it extremely difficult for employers to hire illegal immigrants, roughly 40 percent of whom have been paid subminimum wages at some point. Without a pool of easily abused illegal laborers, businesses would raise pay for Americans.
Several senators also recently introduced the Raise Act, a bill that would reduce future levels of legal immigration.
It's time for our leaders in Washington to scale back both legal and illegal immigration. By doing so, they can further tighten the labor market and force businesses to bring less-advantaged Americans back into the workforce.
OPEN BORDERS: IT’S ALL ABOUT KEEPING WAGES DEPRESSED!
"In the decade following the financial crisis of 2007-2008, the capitalist class has delivered powerful blows to the social position of the working class. As a result, the working class in the US, the world’s “richest country,” faces levels of economic hardship not seen since the 1930s."

"Inequality has reached unprecedented levels: the wealth of America’s three richest people now equals the net worth of the poorest half of the US population."

 

PELOSI, FEINSTEIN, KAMALA HARRIS AND GAVIN NEWOMS’S MEXIFORNIA

 

Report: California’s Middle-Class Wages Rise by 1 Percent in 40 Years

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
3 Sep 2019172
6:24

Middle-class wages in progressive California have risen by 1 percent in the last 40 years, says a study by the establishment California Budget and Policy Center.

“Earnings for California’s workers at the low end and middle of the wage scale have generally declined or stagnated for decades,” says the report, titled “California’s Workers Are Increasingly Locked Out of the State’s Prosperity.” The report continued:
In 2018, the median hourly earnings for workers ages 25 to 64 was $21.79, just 1% higher than in 1979, after adjusting for inflation ($21.50, in 2018 dollars) (Figure 1). Inflation-adjusted hourly earnings for low-wage workers, those at the 10th percentile, increased only slightly more, by 4%, from $10.71 in 1979 to $11.12 in 2018.
The report admits that the state’s progressive economy is delivering more to investors and less to wage-earners. “Since 2001, the share of state private-sector [annual new income] that has gone to worker compensation has fallen by 5.6 percentage points — from 52.9% to 47.3%.”
In 2016, California’s Gross Domestic Product was $2.6 trillion, so the 5.6 percent drop shifted $146 billion away from wages. That is roughly $3,625 per person in 2016.
The report notes that wages finally exceeded 1979 levels around 2017, and it splits the credit between the Democrats’ minimum-wage boosts and President Donald Trump’s go-go economy.
The 40 years of flat wages are partly hidden by a wave of new products and services. They include almost-free entertainment and information on the Internet, cheap imported coffee in supermarkets, and reliable, low-pollution autos in garages.
But the impact of California’s flat wages is made worse by California’s rising housing costs, the report says, even though it also ignores the rent-spiking impact of the establishment’s pro-immigration policies:
 In just the last decade alone, the increase in the typical household’s rent far outpaced the rise in the typical full-time worker’s annual earnings, suggesting that working families and individuals are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. In fact, the basic cost of living in many parts of the state is more than many single individuals or families can expect to earn, even if all adults are working full-time.
Specifically, inflation-adjusted median household rent rose by 16% between 2006 and 2017, while inflation-adjusted median annual earnings for individuals working at least 35 hours per week and 50 weeks per year rose by just 2%, according to a Budget Center analysis of US Census Bureau, American Community Survey data.
The wage and housing problems are made worse — especially for families — by the loss of employment benefits as companies and investors spike stock prices by cutting costs. The report says:
Many workers are being paid little more today than workers were in 1979 even as worker productivity has risen. Fewer employees have access to retirement plans sponsored by their employers, leaving individual workers on their own to stretch limited dollars and resources to plan how they’ll spend their later years affording the high cost of living and health care in California. And as union representation has declined, most workers today cannot negotiate collectively for better working conditions, higher pay, and benefits, such as retirement and health care, like their parents and grandparents did. On top of all this, workers who take on contingent and independent work (often referred to as “gig work”), which in many cases appears to be motivated by the need to supplement their primary job or fill gaps in their employment, are rarely granted the same rights and legal protections as traditional employees.
The center’s report tries to blame the four-decade stretch of flat wages on the declining clout of unions. But unions’ decline was impacted by the bipartisan elites’ policy of mass-migration and imposed diversity.
In 2018, Breitbart reported how Progressives for Immigration Reform interviewed Blaine Taylor, a union carpenter, about the economic impact of migration:
TAYLOR: If I hired a framer to do a small addition [in 1988], his wage would have been $45 an hour. That was the minimum for a framing contractor, a good carpenter. For a helper, it was about $25 an hour, for a master who could run a complete job, it was about $45 an hour. That was the going wage for plumbers as well. His helpers typically got $25 an hour.
Now, the average wage in Los Angeles for construction workers is less than $11 an hour. They can’t go lower than the minimum wage. And much of that, if they’re not being paid by the hour at less than $11 an hour, they’re being paid per piece — per piece of plywood that’s installed, per piece of drywall that’s installed. Now, the subcontractor can circumvent paying them as an hourly wage and are now being paid by 1099, which means that no taxes are being taken out. [Emphasis added]
Diversity also damaged the unions by shredding California’s civic solidarity. In 2007, the progressive Southern Poverty Law Center posted a report with the title “Latino Gang Members in Southern California are Terrorizing and Killing Blacks.” In the same year, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times described another murder by Latino gangs as “a manifestation of an increasingly common trend: Latino ethnic cleansing of African Americans from multiracial neighborhoods.”
The center’s board members include the executive director of the state’s SEIU union, a professor from the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the research director at the “Program for Environmental and Regional Equity” at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Outside California, President Donald Trump’s low-immigration policies are pressuring employers to raise Americans’ wages in a hot economy. The Wall Street Journal reportedAugust 29:
Overall, median weekly earnings rose 5% from the fourth quarter of 2017 to the same quarter in 2018, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For workers between the ages of 25 and 34, that increase was 7.6%.


The New York Times laments that reduced immigration does force wages upwards and also does force companies to buy labor-saving, wage-boosting machinery. Instead, NYT prioritizes "ideas about America’s identity and culture.” http://bit.ly/2Zp2u2J 

NYT Admits Fewer Immigrants Means Higher Wages, More Labor-Saving Machines