President Donald Trump’s deportations may give a 17 percent wage gain to American construction workers, according to the New York Times.
The wage gain is predicted by a New York Times article that described how cheap migrant labor helped a builder prepare a $2.65 million home for sale to wealthy Americans.
Without immigrant workers, Mr. Anderson’s labor costs could jump by 17 percent, adding $116,000 to his budget, the article lamented:
A shock to the labor market by a loss of workers through deportation and the fear of deportation could potentially drive up wages … Without immigrant workers, [builder Nathan] Anderson’s labor costs could jump by 17 percent, adding $116,000 to his budget.
“Why is that so bad?” said a puzzled Steven Camarota, the research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, adding:
In this particular example … someone in the top 1 percent or 1/10 of 1 percent can afford that house, but they’re going to have to pay some more for it. Yet aat the same time, working class Americans– bricklayers, concrete workers, carpenters, what have you — are going to make more money. So it seems like a really good redistribution of income from the very top to more middle-income people. That would be good.
The $2.65 million house was priced at almost six times the average cost for a new home in Arizona.
The New York Times reporter, Ronda Kaysen, explained how the cost of the building’s foundation, for example, would rise by 20 percent:
Last September, once the architectural drawings were complete, the building permits approved and the site prepared for construction, a crew arrived to lay the foundation, costing about $59,000. On the busiest days, as many as eight workers were on site. Some days, as few as three or four. Almost 70 percent, or $40,000, of the foundation budget, went to labor. About 90 percent of the crew were immigrants. Without them, [Anderson’s] labor costs could swell to $49,800.
The newspaper’s admission of 20 percent pay cuts may be a gross underestimate of the economic damage. In 2018, for example, Blaine Taylor, a U.S. construction worker, told Breitbart News that construction wages in California were roughly $45 an hour in the late 1980s. By 2018 — nearly two decades after illegal aliens began flooding the industry — wages were standing at just $11 an hour, he said.
The New York Times article illustrates the widespread recognition in media outlets and banking reports that President Joe Biden’s mass-migration policy cut wages for Americans while President Donald Trump’s deportation policy is raising wages for Americans.
“A reduction in labor supply means upward pressure on wages,” Stephen Brown, deputy chief North America economist with Capital Economics, told CBS MoneyWatch on January 23.
“The implication of what’s happening with deportations … is that we should expect continued wage growth in 2025” in construction, Matt Saunders, vice president of building products research at John Burns Research and Consulting, said mid-March.
“Low-wage migrant workers might depress wage gains for other low-wage workers,” the JP. Morgan investment firm said March 26.
For a decade, Breitbart News has tracked these admissions, which were rare until the election of Joe Biden in 2020. The admissions rapidly expanded once business groups began to argue in Biden’s term that low-wage migration could reduce inflation from housing and other sources.
That self-serving argument marked a sudden reversal from the prior self-serving insistence that migration had a negligible impact on Americans’ wages.
Many left-wing reporters have persuaded themselves to tout the business groups’ new anti-inflation argument for cheap immigrant labor, said Camarota:
There’s still the perception that business interests are in the Republican Party, and as such, it’s very tempting for [pro-migrant] reporters to say, “Look, you’re screwing your own people here — Republicans want this immigration!”
It lets the reporters who are generally progressives say “We’re concerned about businesses and we’re concerned about the availability of labor they have, and we’re looking out for this big part of your Republican constituents. Why aren’t you listening?”
Unfortunately, what it suggests is a lot of reporters [have] a deep concern for the plight of immigrants, not the wages of working class Americans.
Camarota’s narrative is illustrated by another New York Times article on March 3.
The impact [of deportations] is being felt not only in immigrant homes and communities, but also in the industries that rely on immigrants as a source of willing and inexpensive labor, including residential construction, agriculture, senior care and hospitality. American consumers will soon feel the pain.
“Businesses across industries know what comes next when their work force disappears — restaurants, coffee shops and grocery stores struggling to stay open, food prices soaring, and everyday Americans demanding action,” said Rebecca Shi, chief executive of the American Business Immigration Coalition.
The reporter in the construction article explained how she came up with the estimated wage gains:
Mr. Anderson sat down with The New York Times and estimated how his labor costs might change without immigrant workers, based on his personal experience, and using this house as a model. The Times also applied national and regional labor trends to his calculations, and analyzed construction industry work force demographics from census survey data. Given that Trump policies have affected both documented and undocumented immigrants, we did not differentiate between the two groups.
The reporters’ narrow focus on claimed labor shortages also hides the impact of migration on productivity numbers or employers’ willingness to fund and train the millions of alienated men who have fallen out of the economy, said Camarato.
“Employers can respond to [wage gains] by changing their recruitment practices, but also adopting more productive production, such as [the use of] more pre-fabrication than trying to build everything on site,” he said.
“Labor-saving devices and techniques that increase productivity, ultimately, would be very good for [national] growth and prosperity,” he said.
The same economic trend is visible in the white-collar sector, where the H-1B program has been used by investors, executives, and Indian hiring managers to divert wages and opportunities away from millions of American college graduates. The inflow of mixed-skill visa workers has also stalled corporate productivity and innovation, so denying massive gains to shareholders and tax collectors.
So far, Trump’s deputies have not curtailed the counterproductive H-1B program.
But some political and economic leaders argue that labor shortages will boost productivity and innovation.
The promise of cheap labor is ” a drug that too many American firms got addicted to … [and] globalization’s hunger for cheap labor is a problem precisely because it’s been bad for innovation,” Vice President J.D. Vance told an audience of investors in mid-March.
“I can argue, in the developed countries, the big winners are the countries that have shrinking populations,” BlackRock founder Larry Fink said at a 2024 pro-globalist event hosted by the World Economic Forum in Saudi Arabia. He continued:
That’s something that most people never talked about. We always used to think [a] shrinking population is a cause for negative [economic] growth. But in my conversations with the leadership of these large, developed countries [such as China, and Japan] that have xenophobic anti-immigration policies, they don’t allow anybody to come in — [so they have] shrinking demographics — these countries will rapidly develop robotics and AI and technology …
If a promise of all that transforms productivity, which most of us think it will [emphasis added] — we’ll be able to elevate the standard living in countries, the standard of living for individuals, even with shrinking populations.
“The key question you have to ask when it comes to immigration is, who do you favor? Owners of capital or workers?” said Camarota.
“In general, a larger share of [national income] has been going, over time, to owners of capital. And I think it’s one of the sources of dissatisfaction, indirectly, for the working class,” he said, adding: “Less immigration then is most definitely good for the working class, including the immigrant working class, already.”
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