Mickey Kaus demands crow:
Didn’t Kevin Drum and other leftish bloggers sneer when I suggested that rising unskilled wages were in the offing? I think they did! … How much do the people who serve crow make?
The only trouble is that Kaus hasn’t provided any evidence of any unusual increase in wages for the unskilled driven by a recent immigration crackdown. The fact that states featuring high levels of job growth are seeing wages go up seems utterly unremarkable. Jared Bernstein’s review of the most recent BLS data — not designed to prove any particular point about immigration — indicates that nothing in particular is happening: “Hourly wages continue to grow around 4.0% per year — up 3.9% in July compared to last year — and the jobless rate has hovered between 4.4% and 4.6% since last September. Thus, underlying conditions in the job market do not appear to have changed markedly this year.”
As of July (i.e., before the recent problems in the world of high finance), in other words, the economy had been growing moderately in 2007 just as it was in 2006, and so wages were growing at a moderate pace.