>If you are both right, won't these trends encourage massive movement across
>borders, with the immigrants putting significant downward pressure on wages in
>the US, particularly on the wages of unskilled and semiskilled labor?
There's already been lots of immigration to the U.S. over the last 20 years, to which the debt-crisis-induced depression in Latin America in the 1980s contributed no small amount.
The impact of immigration on wages is very hard to measure. Other factors, like the erosion in the real value of the minimum wage from the early 1980s into the mid-1990s and the erosion of union power have probably contributed a lot more.
Doug