"Census Bureau: American Living Standards Now Seriously Impacted By Immigration"

The numbers are crunched over here.
...This implies that more than half of the decline in native income last year was due to immigration.

These are averages. Among natives without a high school education, the impact will be larger. Similarly, the negative effect of immigrants on black workers will be greater than average, because they are in direct competition.

Immigration enthusiasts to the contrary, there was always a tipping point at which the impact of immigration on the living standards of native-born Americans would start to show up seriously in the data.

Looks like we reached that point in 2004.

Comments

And here

http://www.osjspm.org/101_wages.htm#1

is another link that has a lot of interesting information about wages (average incomes) over recent times, including how they have not increased along with productivity, as might be expected.

This reminded me of this

http://24ahead.com/blog/archives/003759.html#comments

recent post here and the follow-on comments, especially the ones trumpeting current "prosperity", i.e. to counter any suggestion that immigration has negatively impacted US workers.

Anyway, it seems pretty clear things like economic growth (as measured) and productivity, that traditionally have led to rising incomes and standards of living, are not doing so these days. While direct cause & effect can sometimes be hard to prove in this sort of macro-economic data, like I said from a reality on the ground and common sense perspective, e.g. supply/demand, I think most people can see that this constant pumping up of the labor supply is a prime candidate to explain falling average wages, as well as the increasing disparity of income (regarding the latter, it's well established that the areas of the country least affected by immigration have the most egalitarian distribution of income).

So I guess it's a good thing inflation has not been high as well.

FWIW

Here:

http://www.laborresearch.org/charts.php?id=8

is a link that shows the (generally) falling trend in non-farm average wages, which has been in place for a good while now. There is a relation in time to the 1965 immigration act, but this is not really enough to show cause/effect. But there is other data, and taken all together you can put together a pretty solid case, which I think matches the perceptions and common sense ruminations of most, supply/demand-wise.

This from a September 1 "New York Times" editorial:

"And additional census data obtained by the Economic Policy Institute show that only the top 5 percent of households experienced real income gains in 2004. Incomes for the other 95 percent of households were flat or falling."

It isn't hard to figure out who is profiting from massive immigration.

The passage below documents changes in median real personal income over the past 30 years and the shift in national income from labor to capital due to oversupply of lesser-skilled labor.Is there anyone dumb enough to think that massive immig ration, both legal and illegal,does not contribute greatly to that oversupply?
http://tinyurl.com/78yxa
(...)
At the bottom end of the educational scale, the median real personal income for those over 25 with grade school education only was down 8 percent (0.29 percent per annum) in 1973-2003, for those with some high school it was down 29 percent (down 1.13 percent per annum) for those with high school diplomas it was down 18 percent (0.66 percent per annum), and for those with some college by 10 percent (0.37 percent per annum.) Only for those who graduated from a 4 year college did the 30 year period 1973-2003 show real income improvement, by 6 percent (0.20 percent per annum). Note that the income change for each educational segment is at or below the overall average; much of the movement in 1973-2003 has consisted of people investing more money and time in their education than their predecessors, for little or no improvement in net income.

Just a reminder: Real Gross Domestic Product per capita increased over the 1973-2003 period from $20,484 in 2000 dollars to $35,456, an increase of 73 percent, or 1.85 percent per annum, a greater increase than the income of any of the groups listed, including women as a whole. In other words, since 1973 there has been a huge shift from labor to capital in national income, together with a modest shift from the private sector to government, so that individual incomes have benefited scarcely at all from the healthy