Amid all the debate over the Senate border negotiations, it’s worth remembering that there have been voices for some time now saying the border crisis is a good thing because it reduces inflation by holding down wages.

Writers at the Wall Street Journal and Yahoo Finance and elsewhere have argued that the massive influx of immigrants in the last three years, most of it illegal, has “done a great deal” to bring down consumer prices by reducing wages. This is hilariously ironic given that apologists for mass immigration used to argue that immigration was great because it had no impact on wages. Well, which is it?

In a new analysis, my colleague Steven Camarota has done what none of the news coverage has — estimated the likely impact of recent immigration on overall consumer prices. Put simply, it’s not mathematically possible for there to have been much effect.

It’s not that immigration doesn’t reduce the wages of American workers; it does. But while this creates real hardship for certain parts of the workforce, even Biden’s tsunami of illegal immigration doesn’t represent a large enough share of the labor force, and is concentrated in low-wage sectors of the economy, that it just can’t have a large effect on overall consumer prices.

Camarota found that over the last three years, immigration increased the supply of workers by about 2.1 percent. Taking this increase and multiplying it by the likely impact on wages and then taking into account capital’s share of the economy, he estimated a possible price impact of just 0.37 percent on overall consumer prices.

And this is almost certainly an overestimate. Camarota points out that because immigration has tended to increase the supply of workers in lower-wage jobs that account for a relatively small share of GDP, the impact on actual prices is likely significantly smaller. What’s more, the estimate assumes that all the savings from lower worker wages are passed on to consumers, and none of it is retained by employers in the form of higher profits, which seems very unlikely. Finally, his estimate assumes that adding millions of people to the country has no impact on demand for goods and services, which itself is inflationary.

The bottom line is that immigration does impact the wages of some American workers significantly — primarily the poorest and least-educated Americans. But the impact of the recent influx on overall consumer prices must be trivial, if there’s any at all.