First Tom Friedman, now T.A.. Frank/Vanity Fair has a stopped clock moment

THE DEMOCRATIC CASE FOR RESTRICTING IMMIGRATION

Regulations never work out entirely as planned or hoped, but, in an ideal world, a skills-based selection system and an end to illegal immigration would lead to dramatic improvements for Americans in the coming decades, similar to the period of wage compression and social cohesion that characterized the four-decade stretch of low immigration prior to 1965. It would mean a more harmonious and caring country with a stronger social safety net. It would mean a prioritization of equity over pace of economic growth. So here’s an attempt to lay out a non-hostile—meaning non-Trumpian—vision of what might happen with a Trumpian immigration policy, a best-case theory for a world that admittedly tends to surprise us in practice.

With stricter border enforcement, employers would immediately start to feel a reduction of available labor, as is already happening. Wages would tick up. On the more gradual front, with a system that selects for skill, most immigrants coming to the United States would out-earn the native-born, raising per-capita productivity for everyone and boosting our fiscal health. With the share of low-skill workers becoming smaller, many sorts of employment would start to pay better: home care, security work, massage therapy, dishwashing, gardening, housekeeping, cleaning, construction, gardening, manufacturing. Out in the fields, agricultural wages would likewise start to rise little by little. Union drives would go better, as employers stopped being able to threaten workers with deportation. We’d see more productivity innovations as labor costs forced businesses to make better use of their human resources or to mechanize, as in Japan. . .

T.A. Frank Vanity Fair