From the article:
When the federal government banned the use of farmworkers from Mexico in 1964, California’s tomato growers did not enlist Americans to harvest the fragile crop. They replaced the lost workers with tomato-picking machines.
The Trump administration on Wednesday embraced a proposal to sharply reduce legal immigration, which it said would preserve jobs and lead to higher wages — the same argument advanced by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations half a century ago.
But economists say the tomato story and a host of related evidence show that there is no clear connection between less immigration and more jobs for Americans. Rather, the prevailing view among economists is that immigration increases economic growth, improving the lives of the immigrants and the lives of the people who are already here...
“The story that ‘when labor supplies go down, wages go up’ is a cartoon,” said Michael A. Clemens, an economist at the Center for Global Development who has studied the end of the Mexican guest-worker program, which was known as the Bracero program...
Also, Mr. Clemens said that points-based systems tended to prioritize education. That might not be advantageous to the economy when in fact employers also need workers with fewer skills. He noted that the Commerce Department has projected that demand for workers without a college education will significantly outstrip the growth of the working-age population.
“It’s a political myth that the principal need is for high-skilled workers,” he said.
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