A Conservative's Answer to Illegal Immigration: Raise the Minimum Wage - A Lot

September 28, 2011 by Left in Alabama

This month's issue of the American Conservative magazine has a compelling cover story: Immigration, Republicans, & the End of White America.  The author, Ron Unz, plays it straight, warning that Republicans hostile to the minimum wage "have substituted dogma for thinking."

As an example, conservative firebrand Rep. Michele Bachmann recently hinted that the solution to America’s current economic problems might involve substantially reducing our existing minimum-wage rates. Presumably, she believes our country would prosper by cutting its wages to Sub-Saharan African levels, then naturally importing millions of Sub-Saharan Africans happy to work at those rates.

Unz argues for a higher minimum wage and ties it to the issue of immigration.  He argues that increasing the mimimum is a tactic to reduce immigration instead of building a low wage economy that encourages it:

By contrast, the sharp constriction in the labor supply resulting from steep reductions in additional immigration would dramatically boost worker wages, especially at the low end, with current immigrants themselves being among the greatest beneficiaries. An increase of a couple of dollars per hour or more could make huge improvements in the difficult existence of the working poor, perhaps allowing them to exit the debt treadmill and stand a better chance of eventually rising into a revitalized middle class. Admittedly, corporate profits might suffer a little and some businesses at the lowest end might disappear; but corporate profits are already doing quite nicely these days, and it makes no sense for developed countries to desperately compete with the impoverished Third World for jobs that are only viable under Third World salaries. Immigration restrictions that raised working-class wages by a couple of dollars an hour would also do wonders for the fiscal health of the Social Security system and government finances in general.

Unz addresses the "automatic argument that jobs will be lost" if the minimum wage rises - calling it a "feature, not a bug."  He notes the immediate impact on working class families - a 20-30% boost in take home pay - and argues that those most affected by the change would be the "more recent immigrants" with weaker "language or job skills" and those people would be less likely to find jobs.

Moreover, although this wage structure would tend to “grandfather” a considerable fraction of existing illegal immigrants, it would constitute a very formidable barrier to future ones. Paying $12 per hour might be reasonable for a reliable employee who had worked with you for several years, but would be much harder to justify for an impoverished new arrival speaking minimal English and with no track record. To a large extent, the undocumented job window in America would have permanently slammed shut.

Now, this is something you just don't see every day: the publisher of a conservative political journal pushing for a type of amnesty for undocumented workers and a substantial increase in the minimum wage.

Unz adds an interesting political dimension to his proposal with his discussion of how a minimumwage hike proposed and implemented by the GOP would help the party retain one of its core constituencies - working class white voters:

But we should also recognize that these days a crucial component of the Republican electorate consists of working-class whites, often strongly religious ones, who tend to live in non-unionized low-wage states or who otherwise generally subsist, sometimes with considerable difficulty, on the lower rungs of the economic ladder. Proposing a large wage increase to a socially conservative evangelical Christian who works at Wal-Mart and currently struggles to pay her bills would be the sort of simple, clear message that might easily cut through an enormous amount of ideological clutter. And even if Rush Limbaugh, who earns tens of millions of dollars each year, denounced this proposal as “big-government liberalism,” for once his views might not find receptive ears. I suspect that a very substantial fraction of Michele Bachmann’s supporters fall into exactly this socioeconomic category.

Political elites just don't understand the realities of most peoples lives, Unz observes.  As such, they have no clue what a potent issue the minimum wage is and how wildly popular an increase would be to huge segments of the electorate.

In California, in 1996, labor activists managed to get an amendment on the state ballot that would increase the state's minimum wage by 35%.  Of course, Republicans and business interests freaked and began working on strategies to fight the measure.

Until their pollsters told them they'd be wasting their time:

Once Republican pollsters began testing the issue, they discovered voter support was so immensely broad and deep that the ballot initiative could not possibly be defeated, and they advised their business clients to avoid any attempt to do so, thus allowing the measure to pass in a landslide against almost no organized opposition. Afterward, the free-market naysayers who had predicted economic disaster were proven entirely wrong, and instead the state economy boomed.

The article is LONG - 18 pages when I printed it out!  Still, it's worth a read for several reasons:

• Unz's willingness to call out some of the crazier elements of the GOP is refreshing.
• Historical perspective: the beginning of the article is an overview of how the modern GOP became, in Unz's words "the White Party."  He unflinchingly faces the racist codewords and campaigns that made it that way.
• His relatively evenhanded discussion of the pros & cons of immigration and flatly states: "The notion that masses of non-white immigrants will turn our cities into violent battlefields is a total absurdity."

It's hard to believe I'm directing our readers to an article in "The American Conservative," but the author has some interesting observations and proposals. 

Although some of his ideas - like paying undocumented workers to leave the country - are probably total non-starters, he has at least started a civil conversation that doesn't include the use or threat of firearms.  That's a refreshing change from my own Congressman Mo "everything short of shooting them" Brooks!

An increase in the minimum wage would help spur the economy far more than tax cuts for millionaires - even if we have to sell it to the GOP as an "anti-immigration" bill.