Biden administration defends immigrant labor while sending 1,500 troops to the border

• President Biden is sending 1,500 troops to the southern border.
• Yet, his secretary of Homeland Security says employers "are desperate for workers."

President Joe Biden's administration is sending mixed messages on immigration.

Biden has used Title 42, which allows curbs on immigration to protect public health, to quickly turn away migrants seeking asylum at the US border with Mexico. The COVID-era rule expired May 11, so the Biden administration is now sending troops to tamp down on border crossings. But alongside that crackdown, the head of the department in charge of policing the border is arguing that immigration is good for the economy.

Anticipating a surge of migrants with the end of Title 42, Biden's Department of Homeland Security asked the Department of Defense to send 1,500 troops from the Army and Marines to fill ground-based detection and monitoring gaps, take over administrative and warehouse work, and free up border patrol agents. These troops would start to arrive May 10 and stay at the border for 90 days, adding to the 2,500 troops from the US National Guard that are already there.

Despite taking such measures to police the border, Biden's Department of Homeland Security argued on the day that Title 42 ended that immigrant labor is needed to address America's labor shortage.

"There are businesses around this country that are desperate for workers," Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of Homeland Security, said at a press conference on May 11, when asked about the cost of illegal immigration to American taxpayers.

There are "desperate workers in foreign countries that are looking for jobs in the United States where they can earn money lawfully and send much-needed remittances back home," he continued.

"What is the cost of a broken immigration system? That is the question that I am asked, and that is the question that I pose to Congress because it is extraordinary," he said.

Immigration has mixed effects on the US economy and native-born workers. According to George Borjas, an economist at the Harvard Kennedy School writing for Politico Magazine, immigration not only increases the incomes of immigrants had they not come to the United States but adds $50 billion annually to the total wealth of the native population.

However, immigrants receive government assistance at higher rates than citizens, creating a fiscal hole of at least $50 billion for American taxpayers to plug, Borjas said.

While immigration might be an economic wash, Borjas argued it saturates the labor market with low-skill workers who compete down wages. He found immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the low-skilled labor supply by 25%. As a result, native workers who dropped out of high school and typically earn $25,000 annually saw their earnings drop by between $800 and $1,500 each year, he estimated.

However, other studies suggest that immigration is more of a net positive for the economy over the long-term. A Penn Wharton analysis argued that immigrants cannot truly replace native-born workers because their superior communication skills give them a leg up in manual labor-intensive occupations or allow them to shift into occupations like personal services and sales, leaving new arrivals to mostly compete with older immigrants. They also found that as firms increase their capital investments to keep up with the increased supply of workers, the average wage increased for native workers in the long run.

Still, one of the two studies Penn Wharton cited, done by Borjas, showed immigration depressed the wages of native workers who didn't graduate from high school.

As for Borjas, the oversaturated low-skill labor market shifts $500 billion annually from the workers already here to the economic winners, who are primarily employers.

"Put bluntly, immigration turns out to be just another income redistribution program," he concluded.