By Daniel Garza, President, The LIBRE Institute

Many politicians claim that the best way to help workers achieve the American Dream is to raise the minimum wage. Allowing politicians to impose wage mandates on the private sector is a short sighted approach and ignores the hundreds of thousands of victims left jobless caused by increases in labor costs.

Proponents of this policy change have been successful in over a dozen cities, counties, and states passing or preparing minimum wage increases to $15 this year alone. While many cast this move as a boon for Latinos, the data suggest otherwise.

ADVERTISEMENT

Consider Seattle: politicians in the Emerald City decided in 2014 to gradually increase the minimum wage to $15 by next year. Yet Washington State University economists found only a limited impact on workers' earnings. In return for that negligible change, however, the average worker had their hours reduced, and unemployment among low-income workers grew 1.2 percent, affecting thousands of people.

Make no mistake: this critique is not being made from an ivory tower. While I appreciate efforts to help my community get ahead, the minimum wage could have held me back personally. Like so many others who have immigrated to this country, my family and I worked as migrant laborers in Washington, and worked long days just to get by.

We moved around, to Nebraska and Washington, following the harvest seasons. But a $15 mandated wage would have made it too expensive for anyone to hire me and allow me to gain the experience and learn the skills I would need to realize a career of my choosing. For some of the other migrant workers—many of them young men who were still learning to speak English, a higher minimum wage would been even more of an obstacle for those looking to unleash their vast capacities in a career outside the agriculture sector. I shudder to think what would have happened had we been kept on the sidelines when we really needed to be working in order to gain the experience and skills needed to move on and up.

That's because artificial wage hikes inevitably price people out of a job—usually younger people just starting their careers, or those working in lower-income professions.

Young Latinos have the most to lose in this scenario. The average Latino worker is 10 years younger than the general population, and more likely to depend on access to lower-wage, entry-level positions. We're just starting to achieve the American Dream—we can't afford to have it pushed further out of reach.

Most economists agree that the minimum wage harms people. Research from a Federal Reserve scholar found that the overwhelming number of credible studies show job losses following from minimum wage hikes. Other studies routinely find that minimum wage hikes harm the people they're supposed to help.

I consider myself very blessed that my family and I had the opportunity work and create value any way we could, back when we worked on the fields in my childhood. It was my first and necessary step on the road to achieving my personal aspirations. Yet it appears that many U.S. Hispanics today could lose access to that very same kind of opportunity. Whether on farms, in restaurants, or even bagging groceries, many young Latinos have a lot riding on whether similar minimum wage hikes spread across the country. We want and need opportunities to enter the workforce and move up the career ladder. For that, politicians need not interfere.

By Daniel Garza

President

The LIBRE Institute