California conservative submits ballot initiative for higher minimum wage - to deter immigration.

[pampango]

Last week, Ron Unz, a California businessman, submitted a ballot initiative to the California secretary of state that would raise the state minimum wage to $12 an hour in 2016 from the current $8. The federal minimum wage is $7.25. What is curious about the Unz initiative is that he is a conservative who defends a higher minimum wage on conservative grounds. In an interview with The New York Times, he said it would reduce government spending on welfare. A recent study from the University of California, Berkeley, estimated that welfare benefits for low-wage workers amount to $7 billion a year.

More controversially, Mr. Unz also contends that a higher minimum wage would curb illegal immigration. He has made this argument for some years in a variety of liberal and conservative publications.

The automatic rejoinder to proposals for hiking the minimum wage is that “jobs will be lost.” But in today’s America a huge fraction of jobs at or near the minimum wage are held by immigrants, often illegal ones. Eliminating those jobs is a central goal of the plan, a feature not a bug.

Interestingly, liberals have made this same argument. Writing in The New York Times in 2006, the former Massachusetts governor and 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael S. Dukakis and Daniel J.B. Mitchell, an economist at the University of California, Los Angeles, also defended a higher minimum wage partially on the grounds that it would disemploy illegal immigrants. As they explained:

If we want to reduce illegal immigration, it makes sense to reduce the abundance of extremely low-paying jobs that fuels it. If we raise the minimum wage, it’s possible some low-end jobs may be lost; but more Americans would also be willing to work in such jobs, thereby denying them to people who aren’t supposed to be here in the first place.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/03/the-minimum-wage-cure-for-illegal-immigration/

Interesting to see a coincidence of liberal pressure to raise the minimum wage and a few conservatives who see it as a way to reduce welfare spending and limiting immigration.