From 1974 (they don't have data before that) to 2000, real mean personal income goes from 32K to 43K. [1], that's for individuals. The graph is useful to look at.
This is complex, for example there are also more single parent / single person households which tends to lower household incomes.
This might be compensated my the raise of monoparental households.
Way back in the ACA debates, when people talked about bending the cost curve, many people's eyes may have glazed over but that's exactly what we need to figure out a way to do. Not have a debate over immigration.
>Immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer. And the additional profits are so large that the economic pie accruing to all natives actually grows... But behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year. Immigrants, too, gain substantially; their total earnings far exceed what their income would have been had they not migrated.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinto...
Unless you're an immigrant or high up in tech business why would you cheer more high-skill immigrants? It will depress your wages and the economic gains will not accrue to you.
Why would you cheer against slavery if you could buy some up?
* control minimum wage laws etc.,
* collect the taxes,
* benefit from most of the money being spent locally,
or it’s done abroad, where a foreign government collects all the benefits.
Import duties don’t do much to fix that. And if you have most or all of the workforce, then you get to lobby against other nations’ import duties.
Economists look at the past and extrapolate into future, often with really poor results. With increasing amount of automation, software development is probably safe from paradigm change for a short while. Given that, it is always risky to claim that immigration will increase jobs and wages in the next decade, because it did so in the previous one.
You can see the tail end (looks like they didn't survey it until 1980) of it here: https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf Table 4, look at Black participation rates from 1990 to 2015.
For intuition think of extended families living together, being incarcerated, and being the last hired and the first fired (so out of work longer).
Exactly the answer I was looking for!
From 1974 to 2000, real mean personal income goes from 32K to 43K. [1]. The graph is useful to look at.
I do think some of the story is that most compensation gains went to benefits, especially our crazy expensive health care (again 5% to 18.2% of gdp). So the hourly wages stayed the same, but benefits went up. I think the original point, that more workers did not lower income, still holds.
Really I can't do an Econ Phd to respond to this thread. So I'll outsource to economists, who say more workers do not lower income.
Though it does look like total compensation (adding in benefits) did actually increase recently, they don't have anything for back to 1960. So maybe the story is that wages stayed flat, but benefits accounted for most of the income increase. Not an economist so I don't know how to tease this out.
Heath care does go up from 5% of gdp in 1960 to 18.2% today, maybe most compensation gain is going there? Plus retirement benefits.
But... from 1960 to 2000 the civilian labor force increased from 70 million to 141 million [1]. With all those new workers, by your link, compensation didn't actually shrink. That's weird huh? Also real median family income grew from $41K to $72K [2].
And sure 10 million software engineers added to SV tomorrow would lower wages. But maybe not long term? If it was 10 million countrywide? What would an economist or a careful wage survey say? Anyway we're talking about 85,000 jobs all over the country.
The main point of my comment is that when economists spend 10 years looking at data and arguing out every detail, they conclude that immigration is increasing jobs and increasing wages. They usually conclude that for specific wage markets too.
Maybe we can't rely on some anecdotes in the media to refute their conclusions?
[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf (table 5)
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEFAINUSA672N