From the article:
This article first appeared on the Council on Foreign Relations site.
In his successful election campaign last year, Donald Trump tapped into a genuine and serious set of concerns among many Americans about the impacts of both trade and immigration on their economic well-being.
The faith among policymakers in Washington—that relatively open trade and immigration were an unmitigated good for Americans—required turning a blind eye to economic research and real world evidence that showed that both create winners and losers in the American economy...
The sponsors of the RAISE Act promise that, by cutting immigration in half and in particular by stemming the flow of low-skilled immigrants, the result will be “an increase in wages for working Americans, who are long overdue for a raise.”
The evidence for such a claim is scant, to say the least. A new paper by Michael Clemens of the Center for Global Development and his colleagues takes a deep dive into one of the more notable labor market “shocks” created by restricting immigration—the U.S. elimination of the bracero program in 1964, which cut off an annual supply of roughly 500,000 Mexican farmworkers.
The sudden reduction in supply of workers had no effect on farmworker wages, however, even in states that saw their farm workforce decline by as much as one-third. Instead, farmers opted for automation and other labor-saving tools.
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