Obama is certainly not the first to draw a connection between corporate priorities and low wages. A recent report from the Brookings Institution found that over the past several decades, the payrolls of the largest companies (by market cap) have gotten much smaller, and not because jobs have en masse gone to immigrants willing to work for less. Jerry Davis, a professor at the University of Michigan and the author of the paper, postulates that the new generation of leaner companies is largely related to changes in how the stock market and shareholders assessed value. “By the 1990s it was widely agreed among executives and investors, and many policymakers, that corporations existed primarily to create shareholder value. Other stakeholders were relevant, but at the end of the day, increasing market value was the dominant objective,” he writes. The result? Massive corporate reorganization to cut back on labor spending via outsourcing, lowered wages, or layoffs.

The recession, of course, plays a role in the current predicament. “The strength [in corporate profits] is directly related to the weakness in hourly wages, which are still growing at just a 2 percent nominal pace. The weakness of wages and the resulting strength of profits are telling signs that the US labor market is still far from full employment,” Jan Hatzius, the chief U.S. economist at Goldman Sachs wrote in a 2014 research note. That’s because many companies have learned to be leaner, they hire fewer employees, and still benefit from continually growing productivity. And because the country is still not at full employment, they can keep paying workers less. All of this serves to boost the company’s bottom line, while workers are unable to participate in those benefits.

And keeping those profits high is of critical importance to corporate boards who have to report back to shareholders every three months for quarterly earnings reports. Thinning profit margins or missed earnings can tank a stock price, enraging shareholders and leading them to pressure company executives. That, some economists have said, means that companies place much more value on producing quick, quarterly gains, instead of focusing on strategies that produce long-term success (with the possibility of growing pains) and thriving companies that could better care for employees.

The president’s statement points to the idea that such a dramatic and systemic shift in the way large corporations value and reward millions of workers has had a much more drastic impact on the broad national trend of stifled wages over the past decade than immigrants depressing wages in the shrinking low-skill labor market.