It’s hard for me to imagine how deporting a million illegal immigrants working under the table, or stealing a social security number, would hurt the minimum wage workers
It would hurt Wall Street and GDP metrics, but not the poorest of the poor
Even in the most facile analysis: Reduced labor availability either (a) decreases supply due to failure to harvest or (b) increases prices due to increased labor costs and therefore drives inflation higher faster than bottom-tier wages can accommodate.
It increases automation and therefore productivity. It increases the demand for legal unskilled labor. Money earned is spent in America rather than sent to foreign countries as remittances
Still, none of that outweighs the inflationary pressure.
Increasing automation and therefore productivity means an increase in profits to the owners, not a drop in prices, except in the most competitive industries.
Unemployment is already extremely low. There aren't tons of Americans waiting to step into these jobs. If unemployment were 10% that would be a different story, but we're close to full employment. So instead of the jobs going to Americans, the produce rots in the fields, and prices go up.
Brexit is so funny because it is literally a real world example of how isolation reduces economic growth and causes poverty - and yet, America goes ahead with similar isolation.
> hard for me to imagine how deporting a million illegal immigrants working under the table, or stealing a social security number, would hurt the minimum wage workers
Immigration is a distraction. Trump is deporting fewer folks than Obama did [1], he’s just doing it while pumping tens of billions to his buddies via ICE contracts.
Tariffs are a regressive tax. If food and metal is more expensive, service and manufacturing workers will be pinches.
> love the argument that deporting illegals is meaningless
Red herring. Nobody said this.
My point is Trump isn’t deporting that many people. His numbers are not economically meaningful compared to tariffs. To the extent there are labour pools that would benefit from deportation, they’re geographically concentrated along the border.
If Trump wanted to remove illegals from the American labour pool, he’d target employers. He can’t [1].
The administration seems to be deliberately making the deportations as cruel and scary as possible (CECOT, Alligator Alcatraz, etc) as a means of deterring future illegal immigration and encouraging self deportation. I haven’t looked into the numbers to see how well that’s working or not, but focusing on deportations alone is missing two thirds of the picture.
> sounds like you support deporting illegals, as long as we also eliminate tariffs
I’m saying irrespective of what you and I believe, the current administration isn’t meaningfully deporting anyone.
(To the extent I have policy views on this, it’s for coherence. You can’t do disruptive deportations while ignoring criminals all while launching on again off again tariffs which preclude both long-term domestic investment and trade-barrier reductions.)
No one blames anyone. The more low skilled workers you have, the lower wage they get. the only group that benefits from illegal immigrants is the employers: they can get away with paying less. (Consumers benefit too, ofc).
"people earning roughly less than $806 a week — slowed to an annual rate of 3.7 per cent in June, down from a peak of 7.5 per cent in late 2022"
With inflation dropping from 9.1% in June 2022 to 2.7% in June 2025, real wages for these low earners are now growing for the first time in years. The Financial Times failure to mention this context makes me question their motives.
"The wage growth trend means the lowest paid are now more likely to find themselves among the 40 per cent of US workers whose salaries are not keeping pace with inflation…"
It doesn't change the "Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth" premise of the article, I don't see any hidden motive needed to explain this.
Wage 'growth' after 2+ years of real wage decline (vs stagnation) is the coldest comfort to folks categorized as 'low earner'. Anyone ignoring that make me question their motives
What slowing wage growth? For the poorest the wages have essentially not increased for a long time right? It hasn’t even kept up with inflation. The recent bill actually makes it much worse.
As far as I can tell, over the last few years at least, that's mostly not true: wages outpaced inflation, and it outpaced inflation more for lower-income workers than higher.
> In stark contrast to prior decades, low-wage workers experienced dramatically fast real wage growth between 2019 and 2023
I'm obviously not an expert, but assumed the same thing. I watched a fast food joint near me go from 9/hr to 21/hr in just a few years. Maybe that was just pandemic pricing, I don't know.
But getting >2x salary in such short order is outpacing pretty much everyone else, percentage wise.
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden was bashing Trump for crashing the economy. An economy, Wyden said (paraphrasing) idolized by the world.
Decades of worsening conditions for the commoner is Ron Wyden's idea of a booming economy. Democrats are useful idiots.
Takes $600k/yr now to have buying power of $200k/yr in the 1980s. Inflation in the US has been here for decades hidden as deflation of purchasing power.
> Decades of worsening conditions for the commoner is Ron Wyden's idea of a booming economy. Democrats are useful idiots.
I can't anymore, folks. Republicans passed the largest tax cuts for billionaires, increased the deficit by trillions, and kicked millions of people of medicaid. Meanwhile, Trump is out there creating the most regressive tax system via tariffs we've ever seen which affect the poorest the most.
> Trump is out there creating the most regressive tax system via tariffs
Tariffs incentivize domestic production. See the case of chicken tax and pickup trucks. While we do pay for tariffs now, later down the road we should not as more things would be made domestically. If you don’t do tariffs, there is no way to force producers to onshore.
There has been no start. You don’t build a factory because the President announced a tariff that he is also negotiating a trade deal around.
> what is this reason?
I’m remodelling my deck. I had orders into a steel mill in Utah. Tariffs mean their steel inputs are pricer than competitors in Vietnam. So I switched the order. And I paid with a cheque—if I paid cash I could skip taxes altogether. That wasn’t a thing six months ago.
Meanwhile, software and services aren’t tariffed. Just goods. Guess whose cost of capital has sunk.
It absolutely is when the status quo would have increased taxes. That may not be a cut of current taxes, but in the longer timeframe it is absolutely a tax cut.
Yeah, firing the labor statistics head because Trump say she's been faking the numbers to make him look bad actually makes it seem both obviously politically motivated and casts whatever comes after into doubt. Now their credibility is degraded.
That's different from just saying the numbers are obviously being faked under Biden or whatever with no real evidence because you just feel like the economy is bad and assume corruption. Now there actually does seem to be corruption!
On this topic- last year it was somewhat common for R politicians to criticize the D regime for the “report high, revise low” strategy - if anything, I guess, this firing has been telegraphed. Anyway, those people were also called conspiracy theorists and politically motivated. There’s clearly a conflict of interest between the facts and what is politically expedient on all sides of the political system in the USA.
I personally would prefer that the jobs numbers apparatus was extremely conservative in the sense that it didn’t overstate the strength of the USA economy. I doubt Trump has that goal in mind necessarily, laudable as it might be.
> I personally would prefer that the jobs numbers apparatus was extremely conservative in the sense that it didn’t overstate the strength of the USA economy.
This sounds like a call for it to be biased low? I'd prefer zero net bias - overstate and understate equally often - and as little error as possible. (Also, I'd like a pet unicorn for the munchkin.)
The problem seems to be around the preliminary numbers and how widely they get reported. Maybe this is a case where excessive transparency and reporting partial data that's known to be inaccurate is negatively useful?
Or maybe there could be some way to get people to accept that it's known to be wrong, and only useful if you have the chops to account for that wrongness in whatever you're using it for? But humans in general seem to mostly be allergic to not knowing things, so...
Maybe the wrongness is predictable enough to model and account for, but publishing "expected correction" numbers along with the preliminary numbers would be extremely un-conservative in that doing that is speaking with your own voice rather than just collecting and reporting data.
Such an organization cannot exist. These agencies are always balancing two opposing forces, timeliness and accuracy. Data collection is inherently delayed (e.g. a lot of it is from surveys that businesses complete at their own speed, or from reports that each state/agency submits on their own timeline.) So collection for a given quarter typically completes long after the quarter is over, and then it takes some time to crunch those numbers.
So if you want early data it will inherently be of limited accuracy because that involves a lot of extrapolation with whatever incomplete data has been collected by that time. If you want accurate data you will have to wait for it because that data takes longer to be collected. You do want both because you need to make timely decisions, since most times the early numbers don't get revised by much, but you also want to course-correct when later, better data gives a different signal.
Agencies like the BLS publish their methodologies in great detail. Big revisions have always been happening, only they are getting more attention these days because of the heavy politicization.
Normally they're accurate enough, and the revisions/refinements are small.
The initial estimates haven't been accurate recently, because many workers have been completely dropping out of the economy because they're afraid of immigration raids. Information about these workers is just harder to gather and takes longer to verify.
That's where the timeliness versus accuracy trade-off comes in. There is significant value in having an early signal to act on, especially as long as there is awareness of its limitations. And as I mentioned, this data does come with very clearly documented caveats and methodologies so that users can make informed decisions.
If this is an understood part of the process, why is it such a problem now?
Name some organizations that have "fire employees until we get success". Does that create a culture that prizes success, or just encourage employees to hide failure?
That's a good way of turning the poorest US workers into the poorest US unemployed. If you raise the minimum wage above the actual value of an employee, then they're just going to get fired. Even if they still provide more value than their being paid, it makes automating away their job more competitive.
California tried this with a $20/hr minimum wage in fast food restaurants: the next time you go into a McDonalds, count the number of empty cash registers and number of shiny new ordering kiosks: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34033
Good question - it has a partial answer: minimum wage is to provide a living to a single young person for a shortish period.
Not a family. Especially not families with - for other reasons- only one breadwinner.
The problems of poverty (to the extent the US even experiences it) are broader than demanding someone make uneconomic decisions with their investors capital.
Perhaps if we taxed the billionaires more we could subsidize increased wages for small business owners or even do something actually good like provide universal basic income so that they cannot be so easily exploited for wildly undervalued labor
Deliberately underpaying people and then telling them their work has low value is one of the most disgusting aspects of capitalists. There's lots of CEOs who are not especially productive, they just have leverage.
The government tries hard to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand, but so far has failed 100% of the time. The government can implement wage and price controls, but those still do not set the actual value.
For example, in the USSR, the price of bread was fixed by the state. But the real price of bread was how long you were willing to wait in line for it.
BTW, in the US, you are free to set up a company and then pay your workers whatever you want to. Workers can choose to work for you, or not.
You view this as zero sum. How many new business owners would be created if people had enough to save? How many new businesses would exist if more money was flowing in the economy? Should businesses exist if they can't pay livable wages?
These aren't hypothetical questions. We have an answer for them all over the country where state minimum wages are rising in Democratic states.
We could have a billion Americans and keep employing them productively. Immigration has been America’s superpower for 150 years. The real problem is monopoly firms that suppress wages of workers and innovation at the same time. The same monopolies that outsourced our manufacturing. All of which started with deregulation and tightening of immigration controls.
Yes, the simplistic "immigrants are competion" narratives always disregard the fact that immigrants also contribute to the economy and uplift it. For instance, there is a credible theory that the "immigration crisis" was instrumental in managing the inflation crisis: https://fortune.com/2024/04/12/immigration-inflation-economy...
20 million? You think the US population had an additional 20 million population growth? And that we just absorbed that? That’s probably breaking a record or two.
It would hurt Wall Street and GDP metrics, but not the poorest of the poor
Increasing automation and therefore productivity means an increase in profits to the owners, not a drop in prices, except in the most competitive industries.
Unemployment is already extremely low. There aren't tons of Americans waiting to step into these jobs. If unemployment were 10% that would be a different story, but we're close to full employment. So instead of the jobs going to Americans, the produce rots in the fields, and prices go up.
They want unemployment to be low so they can keep wages and salaries suppressed
The US will find out the hard way how much of their undesirable work is done by people that "steal their jobs". Jobs that no American wants to do.
The UK already has seen this with Brexit https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44230865
Both farms and hotels have an increasing number of jobs being automated where it makes economic sense, or for pure novelty’s sake.
https://www.farmprogress.com/technology/tethered-drones-can-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortage
Increased capacity utilizing automation would introduce automation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productive_capacity
Increasing demand doesn't magically necessitate that technological resources sprout from nothing to replace human resources.
An introductory macroeconomics source instructs one on this
https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-fi...
Immigration is a distraction. Trump is deporting fewer folks than Obama did [1], he’s just doing it while pumping tens of billions to his buddies via ICE contracts.
Tariffs are a regressive tax. If food and metal is more expensive, service and manufacturing workers will be pinches.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-deportations-trump-six-mont...
Red herring. Nobody said this.
My point is Trump isn’t deporting that many people. His numbers are not economically meaningful compared to tariffs. To the extent there are labour pools that would benefit from deportation, they’re geographically concentrated along the border.
If Trump wanted to remove illegals from the American labour pool, he’d target employers. He can’t [1].
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/06/16/nx-s1-5430846/farming-industr...
I’m not sure if this is accurate, but for example: https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/07/31/migrant-crossings-darien...
Having a recession is a proven way to reduce illegal immigration, and we're at least starting to see recessionary signals.
I’m saying irrespective of what you and I believe, the current administration isn’t meaningfully deporting anyone.
(To the extent I have policy views on this, it’s for coherence. You can’t do disruptive deportations while ignoring criminals all while launching on again off again tariffs which preclude both long-term domestic investment and trade-barrier reductions.)
Regardless of the fact that a lot of poor people don't live in the areas where most of those jobs are but they do get their produce from there..
The top 4 counties in the US for agriculture production are all in the central valley in California.
Rising salaries will lead to inflation. Expecting anything else is fantasy
With inflation dropping from 9.1% in June 2022 to 2.7% in June 2025, real wages for these low earners are now growing for the first time in years. The Financial Times failure to mention this context makes me question their motives.
They do talk about inflation in the article.
This is total crap [1][2].
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0102M
[2] https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/
> In stark contrast to prior decades, low-wage workers experienced dramatically fast real wage growth between 2019 and 2023
https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/
("real wages" are wages adjusted for inflation)
But getting >2x salary in such short order is outpacing pretty much everyone else, percentage wise.
No. Nominal wages grew from ‘21 to ‘23, hitting all-time highs in ‘24 [1].
> It hasn’t even kept up with inflation
It did [2].
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0102M
[2] https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/
Decades of worsening conditions for the commoner is Ron Wyden's idea of a booming economy. Democrats are useful idiots.
Takes $600k/yr now to have buying power of $200k/yr in the 1980s. Inflation in the US has been here for decades hidden as deflation of purchasing power.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
I can't anymore, folks. Republicans passed the largest tax cuts for billionaires, increased the deficit by trillions, and kicked millions of people of medicaid. Meanwhile, Trump is out there creating the most regressive tax system via tariffs we've ever seen which affect the poorest the most.
Yet Democrats are the useful idiots. Incredible.
Tariffs incentivize domestic production. See the case of chicken tax and pickup trucks. While we do pay for tariffs now, later down the road we should not as more things would be made domestically. If you don’t do tariffs, there is no way to force producers to onshore.
Stable, long term tariffs. We’re seeing historic falls in manufacturing employment for a reason.
Well, you have to start somewhere.
> We’re seeing historic falls in manufacturing employment for a reason.
In your opinion, what is this reason?
There has been no start. You don’t build a factory because the President announced a tariff that he is also negotiating a trade deal around.
> what is this reason?
I’m remodelling my deck. I had orders into a steel mill in Utah. Tariffs mean their steel inputs are pricer than competitors in Vietnam. So I switched the order. And I paid with a cheque—if I paid cash I could skip taxes altogether. That wasn’t a thing six months ago.
Meanwhile, software and services aren’t tariffed. Just goods. Guess whose cost of capital has sunk.
There were no tax cuts for billionaires in the BBB.
(Not increasing the tax is not a "cut".)
It's just as disingenuous as scaling back a proposed budget increase and calling it a "cut".
The FTC wouldn't let businesses get away with such language, why should the government get a pass?
No Javascript required
Wait what? Anyone here getting 4.7% pay rises?
Why? If you don’t need to negotiate a price, you don’t negotiate it.
He wants people there to be his version of Minitrue, providing the numbers he wants to see, not the real ones:
Reporting unworkers doubleplusun-good, rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling.
Logically what do you think is about to happen?
That's different from just saying the numbers are obviously being faked under Biden or whatever with no real evidence because you just feel like the economy is bad and assume corruption. Now there actually does seem to be corruption!
I personally would prefer that the jobs numbers apparatus was extremely conservative in the sense that it didn’t overstate the strength of the USA economy. I doubt Trump has that goal in mind necessarily, laudable as it might be.
This sounds like a call for it to be biased low? I'd prefer zero net bias - overstate and understate equally often - and as little error as possible. (Also, I'd like a pet unicorn for the munchkin.)
The problem seems to be around the preliminary numbers and how widely they get reported. Maybe this is a case where excessive transparency and reporting partial data that's known to be inaccurate is negatively useful?
Or maybe there could be some way to get people to accept that it's known to be wrong, and only useful if you have the chops to account for that wrongness in whatever you're using it for? But humans in general seem to mostly be allergic to not knowing things, so...
Maybe the wrongness is predictable enough to model and account for, but publishing "expected correction" numbers along with the preliminary numbers would be extremely un-conservative in that doing that is speaking with your own voice rather than just collecting and reporting data.
So if you want early data it will inherently be of limited accuracy because that involves a lot of extrapolation with whatever incomplete data has been collected by that time. If you want accurate data you will have to wait for it because that data takes longer to be collected. You do want both because you need to make timely decisions, since most times the early numbers don't get revised by much, but you also want to course-correct when later, better data gives a different signal.
Agencies like the BLS publish their methodologies in great detail. Big revisions have always been happening, only they are getting more attention these days because of the heavy politicization.
The initial estimates haven't been accurate recently, because many workers have been completely dropping out of the economy because they're afraid of immigration raids. Information about these workers is just harder to gather and takes longer to verify.
Then they’d be a year late.
Perhaps we have to do this. Tailor our statistics for the economically illiterate. That obviously comes with a cost.
Here, take a look for yourself: https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm#2024
If this is an understood part of the process, why is it such a problem now?
Name some organizations that have "fire employees until we get success". Does that create a culture that prizes success, or just encourage employees to hide failure?
California tried this with a $20/hr minimum wage in fast food restaurants: the next time you go into a McDonalds, count the number of empty cash registers and number of shiny new ordering kiosks: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34033
And what's the point of a minimum wage of it doesn't provide a living? That's just letting private enterprise piggyback off the welfare system.
Not a family. Especially not families with - for other reasons- only one breadwinner.
The problems of poverty (to the extent the US even experiences it) are broader than demanding someone make uneconomic decisions with their investors capital.
For example, in the USSR, the price of bread was fixed by the state. But the real price of bread was how long you were willing to wait in line for it.
BTW, in the US, you are free to set up a company and then pay your workers whatever you want to. Workers can choose to work for you, or not.
These aren't hypothetical questions. We have an answer for them all over the country where state minimum wages are rising in Democratic states.
So you’re wrong.
https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/
Got any non Trump sources to back that up?