Wages, Not Immigration, Would Cure the Worker Shortage

The United States is not running out of workers. It is running out of jobs worth taking. In “Small Businesses Want More Workers”, James Freeman of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page reads the latest small-business employment index as proof of a “worker shortage” that only more legal immigration can cure. More workers. More bodies in the labor force. That is the plan. The empty chairs are real. The diagnosis is backwards.

Let me concede the honest half. Small businesses really are struggling to fill positions. Some shortages are genuine. Try finding an electrician this month. A rural town with one big employer can have a real problem. A campground can need a cook in August and fail to find one at the wage on offer. And Freeman’s turn toward legal immigration is the humane pole of a debate that has lately gone somewhere much uglier. More legal immigrants would help this economy. Full stop. Legal immigration belongs in a rich country, and filling a genuine gap has value.

It cannot substitute for paying the people already here enough to take the work.

A shortage is almost always a price wearing a bigger wardrobe. Walk into a grocery store and ask why the sugar is gone. Nobody says no one wants to farm sugar anymore. The answer is price. Raise it, and more sugar shows up. Labor is the same.

There are Americans who will take a job that pays the rent, offers dependable hours, and lets them be home at night. What is missing is not the worker. It is the offer.

The column hands us the answer and walks past it. Freeman reports that owners are “willing to pay up” for workers’ services. Ready. Willing. Pay up. That is the remedy for a material shortage. You get more labor the way you get more sugar: you raise the price. An employer paying the real market price for a person’s time will find candidates. The worker who “can’t be found” is often standing right there. The owner just does not like the number being quoted.

That is the mechanism, straight out of the textbook these pages usually wave around. When an employer cannot find anyone at the wage it is offering, the market is telling the employer to pay more. The whole point of a market is that the price moves until it clears. A shortage that persists for years is not necessarily a shortage of people. It may be a price kept below the point where people come back.

The immigration reflex is how you keep that price where it is. Import a steady supply of workers who cannot vote, have not got a union, and will take the shift, and the going wage does not have to move. If the plan is to bring in more workers to fill the same jobs at the same pay, the policy is not about opportunity. It is about holding wages down.

That is not a conspiracy. It is the predictable result of treating labor as a commodity to be topped up instead of a price to be honored.

When the wage stays low, three people absorb the difference. The migrant absorbs it, paid less than the market would otherwise require. The worker at the bottom absorbs it, because the raise that might have happened does not. And the taxpayer absorbs the rest, because low-wage work in this country is quietly backfilled by Medicaid, food assistance, the earned-income tax credit, and the rest of the transfer system that keeps a “cheap” worker alive.

The cheap labor was never cheap. The bill just never arrives at the employer.

Then there are the Americans in their prime working years who walked away. The conservative answer has bounced between two poles. First, they were too soft, lounging in a hammock paid for by the dole. Now we need to import bodies because they are gone. Both answers skip the same question: what made them leave?

The schedule shifts week to week. The job evaporates the month after you land it. The pay does not clear. The employer calls this flexibility. The worker calls it a life that cannot be planned.

Fix those things, and a lot of the “shortage” shrinks on its own.

And notice what the caliphate line is doing. Freeman wants newcomers vetted so they come “to work and not to create a caliphate.” The aside is ugly and beside the point. It turns imported workers into a slightly dangerous commodity to be screened, rather than people joining a workforce. Which is, of course, exactly why they are wanted in the first place. You cannot organize a supply channel the way you can organize a workforce.

Not even a flawless immigration system can fix what a price is supposed to fix.

So let the wage do the work. Post the real number. Compete on the offer: better pay, dependable hours, and a schedule that treats a family like a fact instead of an inconvenience. Set the floor across the whole industry through a wage board, so no single small business is punished for being the first to pay up. Have owners and workers set the number together, apply it to every shop on the same day, and let the state enforce it. Then the decent employer is not the only one paying.

Give the migrants who come the same rights as the workers they join. No two-tier workforce. No disposable labor channel. No wage floor built on someone else’s legal vulnerability.

When the job pays enough to matter, Americans come back. The chairs fill.

The shortage was never the worker. It was the quoted price.