Trump’s Big Bet on Immigration Isn’t Paying Off for Most Workers

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Instagram teen accounts default teens into automatic protections for who can contact them and the content they can see. Explore teen accounts and all of our ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

Alex Ossola (0:18)

The Trump administration nears a deal to save Spirit Airlines. Plus, how has President Trump's immigration crackdown affected the labor market? We dig into the data.

Paul Kiernan (0:28)

President Trump and his allies have long said that reducing immigration would bring higher wages and more jobs to American-born workers. We did a broad review of labor department data on wages and job growth and unemployment, and we just didn't really find a whole lot of evidence of that.

Alex Ossola (0:46)

And Tesla reports higher profit and sales in its latest quarter. It's Wednesday, April 22nd. I'm Alex Ossola for The Wall Street Journal. This is the PM Edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today.

Tesla reports this afternoon that profit grew 17 percent from a year earlier, while sales grew 16 percent to $22.4 billion.

In the auto division, deliveries were up more than 6 percent. Tesla is trying to pivot its business away from vehicle sales to focus on autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots, neither of which are currently for sale. For more on Tesla's earnings, go to wsj.com. Boeing's commercial jet production kept gaining steam in the first quarter, helping to reduce the company's quarterly loss. Its loss came to $7 million compared to $31 million the year before, and beat Wall Street's expectations. The company still burned through about $1.5 billion in the quarter, a hangover from the production caps that regulators imposed two years ago to address issues with quality control. Officials have relaxed some of those limits, and now more 737 MAX jets are rolling off the line. On CNBC This Morning, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg talked about the company's plan for stepping up production of the plane this summer.

Kelly Ortberg (2:04)

We're hearing very good things about the quality of the airplanes from our customers, so all systems are go for this next rate increase for us.

Alex Ossola (2:11)

Boeing stock closed up 5.5%.

And we're exclusively reporting that the Trump administration is nearing a rescue deal with Spirit Airlines. The agreement could see the US government loaning the discount carrier as much as $500 million. In return, it would receive warrants to take a potential significant stake in Spirit. The government has helped the airline industry in times of crisis, like after September 11th. But rescuing Spirit would be a rare intervention to prop up a single carrier. The White House says it's monitoring the health of the US aviation industry. President Trump yesterday told CNBC that he's troubled by the idea of Spirit going out of business and that maybe the federal government should quote help that one out. In corporate leadership news, former Nike executive Heidi O'Neill will be Lululemon's next CEO starting in September. She'll be expected to help revive the athletic clothing brand in the US. And Best Buy said today that its CEO Cory Berry is stepping down in October. Jason Von Fig, a longtime Best Buy executive, is replacing her. The electronics retailer has reported years of tepid sales growth that weighed on its stock.

President Trump's extension of the Iran ceasefire helped stocks rebound after two straight days of declines. The Nasdaq led the gains, closing up 1.6%. Oil traders weren't so optimistic and Brent Crude, the international benchmark, closed above $100 a barrel for the first time in two weeks.

A new exchange-traded fund is seeing one of the fastest starts in recent history. The Round Hill Memory ETF tracks computer memory and storage stocks and launched quietly earlier this month. In less than two weeks, it has gathered more than a billion dollars in assets, rare for any ETF and an unprecedented feed for such a small money manager. WSJ Markets reporter Jack Pitcher says the fund's success is mostly because it's concentrated in a hot segment of the market.

Jack Pitcher (4:10)

As some of these AI companies are building out the infrastructure and the data centers needed to power their models, they're running into a shortage of memory.

There's only a handful of major companies that make the type of memory they need, and the stocks of those have been absolutely soaring this year. A couple of them are South Korean stocks, including Samsung. A few are based in the US, like SanDisk. And this ETF is a very concentrated bet on four or five of the biggest memory stocks. So it's less risky than only owning one of them, and lets investors easily get exposure. There's also some evidence of bigger investors buying this, like hedge funds based on the ticket sizes. But another kind of unique part about this one is they're seeing a lot of overseas retail interests that they expect is from South Korean investors.