President Donald Trump’s deportation policy is pressuring Texas employers to raise wages, recruit sidelined Americans, and invest in productivity-boosting technology, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
“Texas firms are taking measures to address [Trump’s] impact … [by offering] planned wage and benefit increases and more hiring of U.S.-born workers, naturalized citizens or legal permanent residents,” said an October 17 bank report by pro-migration economists.
Almost half of the surveyed companies said they hope to extend overtime for their employees, a third said they plan to offer increased wages and benefits and to hire more Americans, and one-quarter said they plan to invest in more technology.
Just 13 percent said they plan to scale back operations, and just three percent said they would move work outside the United States.
“The state unemployment rate is low, at 4.1 percent, job postings are holding steady, and wage growth remains healthy,” the Dallas report said.
The good news for American families matches Trump’s emerging plans to grow the economy via productivity and automation, instead of via the post-1990 policy of Extraction Migration as favored by many investors.
“We’re going to need robots … to make our economy run because we do not have enough people,” he told Breitbart News in September, adding:
We don’t enough people to do it. So we have to get efficient … we’ll probably add to [the existing workforce] through robotically—it’s going to be robotically … It’s going to be big. Then, somebody is going to have to make the robots. The whole thing, it feeds on itself … we’re going to streamline things. We need efficiency.
Trump’s focus on productivity puts greater demands on CEOs, C-suite executives, investors, politicians, educators, and many other groups who prefer the easy task of importing endless taxpayer-funded consumers, apartment-sharing renters, and compliant, cheap workers.
Trump’s nascent policy also requires intellectuals to understand migration economics and to recognize their pro-business skew.
That skew is evident in the Dallas report, whose authors lament the wage gains for American families as a “Labor market outlook weaker without immigration.”
The cut-off of migrants also reduces the scale of the national economy, the authors complain:
Some—but likely not all—of the decline in labor supply will be offset with mechanization, technological innovation (including artificial intelligence) or offshoring. Nevertheless, it bears noting that by 2031, all growth in the U.S. population is expected to come from immigration. Hence, when officials set immigration policy, they may also be setting the speed limit for the economy.
Similarly, Axios.com argued that the loss of migrants is bad for business and for national economic growth — without admitting the likely gains for wages and productivity:
The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is projected to reduce the U.S. workforce by 6.8 million people by 2028 and by 15.7 million by 2035, per a study first shared with Axios.
Why it matters: Fewer workers in the labor force could have dramatic effects on the U.S. economy, from lower economic growth to reductions in the nation’s goods and services produced.
The big picture: The drop in workers could alter the nation’s projected demographics and make it difficult to revive manufacturing jobs — or to attract workers in health, agriculture and energy as the population ages.
But the article did quote White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson, who said, “There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force.”
The Axios article was posted by Axios’s “Justice and Race reporter.”
Read the full article here