Jason Richwine - Center for Immigration Studies Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The jobs report about seven minutes away. Jason Richwineer is
with a Center for Immigration Studies. We've had a ton
of deportations from the Trump administration, long overdue. Jason, what
kind of impact do you think it's going to have
on the jobs report?

Speaker 2 (00:14):
Well, it's going to be very interesting to see you.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
I'm not in the prediction business, but from what we've
seen from the data it's been released so far this year,
is that there are about a million fewer immigrants in
the labor force in this month compared to earlier this
year when Trump took office. This is a really unusual situation.
We almost always have the immigrant population going up. It's
going down now. So it's important to understand that just

(00:38):
because you have some immigrants leaving the labor force doesn't
mean that the economy is weak. Because we have a
smaller population, we'd expect to have fewer jobs.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
True enough, I guess the question we comes ja. They
always tried to convince us that we needed to have
or allowed the illegal immigration population to remain because they
were doing jobs that other Americans just were not willing
to do. You think there's any real truth of that
when you get right down to it. They were certainly
doing jobs that many Americans found didn't pay enough to

(01:10):
make them want to do them, but they're not jobs
they refuse to do.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
Yeah, I think you're right about that.

Speaker 3 (01:15):
In fact, we have a report on our website about
jobs that Americans supposedly won't do.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
We looked at census occupations.

Speaker 3 (01:23):
There's about four hundred and twenty five or so different
occupations identified by the Census, and in.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Nearly every one of those, native.

Speaker 3 (01:32):
Born Americans actually are the majority of the workers in
those occupations.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
And so you're exactly right.

Speaker 3 (01:37):
I think when employers no longer are able to rely
on cheap foreign labor, they're going to recruit Americans into
those jobs. And yeah, the wage is going to go up,
the working conditions are going to be better, but they'll
find the labor they need.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
Well, and wages really do sort of need to go
up at this point. I guess you could start making
an inflation argument here about at what point do higher
wages lead to higher inflation? But when you keep wages suppressed,
the other problem is is you still have inflation and
you have people who can no longer afford to do
things like going out to eat because their wages have

(02:12):
not kept up with inflation.

Speaker 3 (02:15):
Well, look, I mean the if you total up the
all the low skilled wages in our economy, it's still
a pretty small part of the overall GDP. So it's
very unlikely that even large wage gains for the bottom
end are going to have a big impact on inflation.
But I want to highlight the fact that, you know,
for so long supporters of mass immigration would deny that

(02:38):
that immigration reduces wages, and now suddenly they're saying, Oh,
it does reduce wages, and that's a good thing because
we're trying to reduce inflation.

Speaker 2 (02:46):
So frankly, I think they had it right the first time.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
I think you're right too, Jason. Thank you. Jason rich
Wine at the Center for Immigration Studies