Is Immigration the Key to Worker Wages?
A local editor argues that the recent stoppage of immigration due to a 'cholera scare' provides an accidental experiment in labor supply and demand.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The New York Press of September 22 states that fewer laborers are looking for employment in domestic service, and that the stoppage of immigration has raised the wages of girls doing general housework from twelve dollars to from sixteen to twenty dollars per month. What an object lesson this is for the manufacturers who have been trying in vain to raise wages. This cholera scare has cost us millions of dollars, but it will be a paying investment to the administration if it has given us a solution to this wage question. Wages actually advanced 50 percent in a few weeks, and the cause will not be disputed by any party: it was not caused by a high or low duty. It was caused by the stoppage of immigration. Is it not the immigrant who has been bringing in fresh supplies of labor to reduce wages here almost to the European level? It is by checking immigration that we may hope to maintain higher wages here. Yet, these manufacturers fight against a duty on imported labor as hard as they fight for a duty on imported goods.
“It is by checking immigration and not goods, then, that we may hope to maintain higher wages here—if they really are higher.”
This piece highlights the historical entanglement between protectionist economic policy, immigration restriction, and labor markets. The argument—that limiting the labor supply will naturally drive up wages—remains a persistent, contentious theme in American labor politics and immigration debates today.
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