“Build the wall! Build the wall!” Thousands of Trump supporters shouted xenophobic remarks at his rallies just 9 months ago. This July, President Trump started to push for his plan that would severely limit even legal immigration to the United States. Then-candidate Trump boasted about how allowing illegal immigrants to enter the country would be harmful to American workers; depressing their wages and increasing unemployment. Trump has also, at times, said he would prefer to eliminate the federal minimum wage and leave the issue of basic worker’s rights up to the states. I say at times, because he has often flip flopped on this issue.

What perturbs me about this is that the President, and so many other Republicans, pride themselves on being fiscally conservative. As if it is somehow inherently better for the economy with conservative policies, many people (even Democrats) will tell you they are fiscally conservative as it is some kind of game changing, edgy political stance that nobody has ever thought of before. If it is so true that these policies are so much inherently better than whatever the liberals can cook up, why is there such inherent contradiction?

It is a very common misconception that an increase in immigration is a net negative for the economy. There is almost no leading economist who will tell you otherwise. Increasing the total size of our economy, and decreasing the cost of goods that are made with cheap, unskilled labor is something that can benefit just about every American. When it is brought up, however, the reasons cited are normally that immigrants will steal jobs that rightly belong to Americans, as well as deflating the wages as the supply of labor will increase. Although it is far from the whole picture, there are elements of truth here. It is estimated that illegal immigration reduces native workers’ salaries by over $100 billion a year. More specifically, a ten percent increase in laborers with a specific set of skills is estimated to decrease wages in that field by three percent.

However, if these fiscal conservatives are so infatuated with illegal immigrants stealing their jobs and deflating their wages, how can they also be against federal minimum wage standards? In fact, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson (R) proposed there be a state imposed $10 minimum wage in Wisconsin in order to combat illegal immigration. With this type of policy, there could be stricter standards on what people are paid under the table, as well as raising wages for American workers. While this could curb the negative effects of immigration, it could still keep some positive effects by growing the size of our economy and attracting workers to jobs that Americans still do not want to take on.

Of course, this is all overlooking the facts that Democrats have supported policies that offset the negative effects of immigration more directly for years. Very few democrats will defend the position that a minimum wage doesn’t mean some jobs are lost or that immigration won’t depress native wages. Instead, and I know this is a scary concept to most fiscal conservatives, the government could raise taxes on business owners after immigration increases to help those that lose their job or have their wages go down. Sadly it seems the only response to this type of policy is to label it as socialism, so I don’t think there will be a legitimate response from the god-like fiscal conservatives anytime soon.