National conservatives have latched onto the idea that cutting immigration will increase wages despite all of the evidence to the contrary. One of the pieces of evidence they cite most is a 2016 article in the Wall Street Journal that states that wages for construction and farm occupations in Arizona went up by 10 percent and 15 percent, respectively, in the 4 years after Arizona passed its immigration enforcement law SB1070 in 2010. Both Oren Cass and Christopher Caldwell use this data point.
The only problem is those claims about wages are not true. Wages did not rise in Arizona after the passage of SB1070. This blog post uses data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) and different methods to investigate whether wages for construction and farm workers rose in Arizona after the passage of SB1070. In every instance, wages did not rise in Arizona after that state passed immigration enforcement laws in 2007 and 2010. Just as economic theory would predict, there was no absolute rise in wages after Arizona cracked down on illegal immigration.
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