China-like wages immigrate to Mass.

Left hides harsh effects of wave of low-skill workers

On CNN and MSNBC, the Delayed Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, story looks like a tearyeyed teenager, surrounded by sign-waving protesters, vowing to fight against evil President Trump and the “injustice” of American immigration law. But in the real world, it looks like Fall River.

“China-like wages now part of U.S. employment boom” is the headline on a Forbes article about an Amazon warehouse coming to Fall River. The article reports starting pay at the warehouse is $12.75/hour and at least one of those jobs requires “the ability to stand for 10 to 12 hours straight in a fulfillment center where the temperature will occasionally exceed 90 degrees.” These wages and work conditions, author Kenneth Rapoza claims, make Fall River’s economy comparable to China’s.

How do you get American workers in 2017 to accept wages similar to those in a Third World (albeit rising) economy? Well, for starters, you load the local labor pool with low-skill immigrant workers. One in five Fall River residents is an immigrant, mostly with a high-school education or below. The result? China on the South Coast. Meanwhile, lower wages mean higher profits for Amazon, giving Jeff Bezos more money to run more stories in The Washington Post (which he also owns) about how Donald Trump is a heartless monster for enforcing immigration law.

What percentage of the immigrants in Fall River are here illegally, or are covered by DACA? Nobody knows for sure. What we do know is that, as George Borjas of Harvard has found, increasing the number of low-skill workers drives down wages.

“According to census data, immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent,” Borjas writes. “As a result, the earnings of [native-born Americans without high school diplomas] dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year.”

Is it a coincidence that, during the same 20 years of massive illegal immigration into Massachusetts and the U.S., household income went down for families at the bottom of the wage ladder? While at the same time, income for the top 20 percent of Massachusetts households jumped by a third?

At the national level, income for low-wage workers fell 5 percent from 1979-2013, according to the Economic Policy Institute, while hourly wages at the top rose 41 percent.

As Borjas explains: “Put bluntly, immigration turns out to be just another income redistribution program.”

In Southie, construction jobs have been “redistributed” to Irish immigrants — on and off the books. In Metrowest, Brazilian laborers flood the landscaping industry. If progressives like U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders really cared about the dreaded “income gap” and the “fight for $15,” they would make common-sense immigration enforcement a policy centerpiece. But they don’t.

Instead, the progressive left plays the “identity politics” card — if you support border security, you hate brown people. The irony is that the American men and women taking the biggest wage hit from low-skilled immigration are disproportionately black and Hispanic.

But who cares about those people? They’re at the bottom of the economic and political ladder. At the top are amnesty activists who prosper off the political fight, Democratic politicians who dream of a massive increase in left-leaning voters, and wealthy elites who embrace DACA and abandon border security as part of their virtue-signaling self-gratification.

These white, collegeeducated suburbanites will never have to compete for a paycheck with these illegal immigrants. In fact, they’re more than happy to pay that nice DACA woman under the table to watch their kids.

Virtue signaling is even better when it saves you a few bucks.