> The minimum wage is why territories like Guam and Puerto Rico have the highest unemployment.

But...they don't, even though Guam, unlike several states, has a higher minimum wage than the Federal level.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_terr...

Guam’s minimum wage is on the low side, about $1 higher than the federal minimum.

> Guam’s minimum wage is on the low side, about $1 higher than the federal minimum.

There are, if I counted right, 19 states and all other federal districts except DC and the Virgin Island at (well, below for American Samoa) the federal $7.25 level (American Samoa's level is also a federal level, but it's federally set lower than the rest of the US), and a few more states at the same level as Guam; so it's pretty close to the middle, not really much on the low side.

I must have been thinking about another territory rather than Guam. It looks like unemployment was counted before the pandemic for the US territories and after the pandemic for states.

Puerto Rico has structural issues related to endemic corruption that discourages business investment, and that is why companies generally avoid doing business there despite the very generous tax incentives for doing business in Puerto Rico.

PR's minimum wage has very little to do with it, except for being a convenient scapegoat.

Corruption that discourages investments is one side of the high unemployment. The other side is tiny businesses that can't even afford to pay minimum wage. They're allowed to pay less than the federal minimum wage if they're sufficiently tiny, but that means that they can't expand.