Between 2021 and 2023, according to the Pew Research Center, the number of illegal immigrants in the United States rose by 33%, from 10.5 million to 14.0 million. “The increase of 3.5 million in two years is the biggest on record,” Pew notes, and this total was “an all-time high.” This was a deliberate policy choice on the part of the Biden administration. Pew notes that “The increase from 2021 to 2023 was driven primarily by growth in the number of unauthorized immigrants who were living in the U.S. with some protections from deportation, such as immigrants paroled into the country and asylum seekers.”
Some Republicans have argued that this massive increase in the supply of labor will lower the price of labor, or wages, to you and me. The DFL appears to agree.
On Monday, a DFL account tweeted an attack on Richard Uihlein, a donor to Rep. Lisa Demuth’s gubernatorial campaign. One of their four charges against him is that he “Shuttled workers from Mexico to undercut American wages at Uline warehouses.”
I am not familiar with Uihlein’s employment practices, but it seems clear that the DFL — or whoever is running this twitter account — shares the economic diagnosis of those like Vice President Vance who believe that mass immigration exerts a downward pressure on American wages.*
Perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised. As the New York Times reports, the position of those like the vice president:
…bears some similarity to positions held by the Democratic Party in the 1980s and ’90s. [Oren Cass, chief economist at American Compass] points to the conclusions of a commission appointed by President Bill Clinton that recommended tighter controls over immigration flows to protect American workers without college degrees. For the same reason, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a progressive firebrand, opposed proposals in the 2000s that gave immigrants a path to citizenship and expanded guest worker programs.
Either way, it is hard to see how the DFL can attack Uihlein for doing what the Biden administration did on an historically unprecedented scale, something they appear to support. Another question, perhaps, for Minnesota’s dogged newshounds to exercise their insatiable curiosity on.
* Economists have lived up — or down, if you prefer — to Harry Truman’s old joke about the one-armed economist on this issue. The New York Times reports that “The Harvard economist George Borjas has long argued that large waves of immigration have hurt workers without a college degree,” but notes that “Dr. Borjas’s conclusions have been widely disputed…”degree,” but notes that “Dr. Borjas’s conclusions have been widely disputed…”
