The news side of the Wall Street Journal has conceded that immigration depresses wages among blue-collar workers. Here’s an excerpt:

Dale Baughman, who has lived in Northwest Arkansas all his life, has had a different experience. Three years ago, the BB-gun manufacturing plant where he worked for 29 years closed and he lost an $18.50-an- hour tool-making job. “It’s hard to find a job and the ones you can find don’t pay anything,” says the 52-year-old, who has a high-school diploma. He looked for machine-maintenance jobs at factories that would match his old pay but found only ones paying $12 to $13 an hour. He partly blames a rise in immigration, which he says is keeping wages low for less-skilled labor…..

Other workers agree that immigrants from Latin America are helping employers push wages down in jobs such as construction, where some native-born workers say they earn less now than they did 10 years ago. According to the Census Bureau, 6.9% of the area’s population was foreign-born in 2000, up from 1.5% in 1990. In addition to Latin Americans, Springdale has the largest concentration of people from the Pacific Ocean’s Marshall Islands outside of their native land — an estimated 4,000 people, many of whom work in local factories and poultry plants.

James Bishop and Lisa Broadwell are longtime residents of Northwest Arkansas and both have years of experience in a trade: Mr. Bishop in machining and Ms. Broadwell in dry cleaning. Yet both are underemployed. “Hispanics are taking over the jobs in the poultry industry — jobs that used to go to people who live here, and as a result, those people that used to be in the poultry industry are taking over our jobs,” Ms. Broadwell said.

H. Abramyan of Res Ipsa Loquitur has posted the entire WSJ article here. Someone should send it to Paul Gigot.

comments (0)   trackbacks (7)