Or they'll just hire more illegals. There's 11.5 million illegals in the US already [1] (edit: vs 3.3m legal workers on or below minimum wage [3]!), a large par

Or they'll just hire more illegals. There's 11.5 million illegals in the US already [1] (edit: vs 3.3m legal workers on or below minimum wage [3]!), a large part of which are probably doing "minimum wage" type jobs for less than minimum wage. Every rise in the cost of doing business legally will push a few more jobs towards the illegal, or law-abiding businesses to bankrupcy from lack of competitiveness. My entirely anecdotal evidence places the dishwasher illegal salary in big cities (my data is from New York in 2010 or so) at around $3/hour. Different countries handle the issue of high minimum wage differently. Some countries have very thorough enforcement and drive the cost of everything through the roof, but end up with a more egalitarian society (I think Norway, where a beer costs as much as a large meal in neighbouring countries, counts). Singapore chooses not to have a minimum wage and to make it easy to import manual labour legally, and affords these labourers the same legal protection afforded any other resident. China uses the hukou system [2] to regulate the influx of unskilled labourers into more prosperous regions. The US simply turns a blind eye to the rule of law when it comes to unqualified labour, which allows businesses to keep their costs low, and politicians to save face and pretend they did something "for the workers", whilst a side effect is increasing the stress on the legal unskilled residents which might even be a positive for politicians as they love a good crisis. Conclusion: legal unskilled workers should fight for the law to be enforced, not for minimum wage to be legally increased. It would both remove competition and drive up demand for their unskilled work, and since there is no population explosion in the United States and legal immigration is incredibly regulated, should result in a natural rise of wages matching the higher cost of living in locations like Seattle. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigrant_population_of_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigrant_population_of... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system [3] http://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-are-characteristics-minimum-wage-workers http://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-are-characteristics-mini...