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If you offer six figures to work as a janitor, of course you'll get people willing to do it. But the end result of that is far fewer janitors, not janitors getting a pay raise. There simply isn't a world where general construction laborers are all making well above average salaries, although there is a world in which construction is completely unaffordable. Drywallers, hotel maids, etc are not suddenly going to be making offshore-rig wages- although there might be no drywallers or hotel maids.
This doesn’t fit a timeline with Covid. We didn’t lack workers to this extant before Covid. Now every sort of fraud seems to have taken off since Covid. Military disability surging, home health care aids surging in NYC, Somali day care fraud. Am I correct in feeling that everyone has figured out a way to get a government check without working? If we just started shutting down all these programs we would suddenly have a lot of hotel maids and janitors? I feel like UBI has already happened.
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It's probably unlikely that we'll end up with zero janitors, general construction workers, drywallers, or hotel maids. Prices find equilibria. Both supply and demand matter.
Adding illegal workers shifts the supply curve to the right; removing illegal workers shifts the supply curve to the left (at a first approximation in the linear range). Both elasticities will matter, but the only way that you can shift the supply curve to the left and not have the price rise is if the demand for janitors is almost perfectly elastic. That seems unlikely.
As I mentioned, removing illegal immigrants very likely has both the effects of increasing price and decreasing output. That is, both increasing wages and decreasing jobs. The proportion depends on elasticities as well as factors in the rest of the general equilibrium, as the market adjusts.
Nothing in anything I've said has any claims on which occupations will or will not make "well above average salaries". That will be up to the market to decide. What counts as "completely unaffordable" is also subjective, but could in theory be supported by quantitative estimates. Prices will rise; wages will rise (they are prices, after all); output will fall; jobs will fall. This is all very standard economic theory and not really contestable. Any other statements about magnitudes of effects require quantitative argumentation.
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