¶ … Immigration on Minimum Wage
The knee-jerk reaction to the news that Congress is set to raise the minimum wage to $7.25 per hour is that it will cause an even greater flood of immigrants to come illegally into the country and take all these minimum wage jobs away from legal residents. The net effect would be to essentially negate the economic benefit of the increased wage. However, when one really examines the issue of illegal immigrants in minimum wage jobs and actually gets under the surface of the superfluous arguments, it is clear that this is the opposite of what will happen. As a result of the minimum wage increase, illegal immigration will actually decrease.
An argument may be made that the reason illegal immigrants enter the United States is to work at the minimum wage jobs that are still better paying than any work available in their country of origin. Thus, the argument would be that if the minimum wage is increased, this incentive for illegal immigration will also increase. However, the problem with this argument is that it fails to consider why illegal immigrants take minimum wage jobs.
The reason illegal immigrants are found working minimum wage jobs is because these jobs are open. There are not enough people willing to work for minimum wage to fill the need of these jobs. Thus, companies are faced with filling them with whomever is willing to work for this wage. Many of these jobs are therefore filled with illegal immigrants, who are more than willing to work for the low wage of the current minimum wage because it is still better than what they would be paid in their home country.
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