Who benefits from low wages for immigrants?
(p. 70) A new wave of immigration has coincided with a stagnation of real wages for most U.S. workers. After rising 81 percent from 1947 to 1973, real wages fell 3 percent from 1973 to 1980 and have barely moved upward since then. This was despite dramatic increases in worker productivity-16.6 percent from 2000 to 2005, for example. At the same time, the country’s richest 1 percent were benefiting from equally dramatic increases in their real income-by 135 percent between 1980 and 2004. There are a number of factors behind the wage stagnation, including Congress’s failure to raise the minimum wage after 1996, and government policies that reduce the ability of unions to organize. But certainly a large part of the explanation is the major shift in the U.S. economy that has resulted in many jobs going to low-paid, vulnerable workers: undocumented immigrants, people thrown out of the welfare system by the 1996 welfare law, and the several million workers employed in assembly plants in Asia
