Maybe to a degree, but a lot of those jobs only exist because of how low the wages are. Very few large corporations can afford to just give everyone a raise. That's a terribly short-sighted view of the economy and business administration.

>Large companies are making absurd profits while paying their employees a pittance

Take a look at profit margins on some big companies. You will definitely be surprised. E.g. Over the last 5 years Walmart averaged <3% profits [1], Amazon averaged <1% [2]. Some tech companies are a lot higher (Apple, NVidia, etc.) but these are not the companies you hear about when people discuss low wages. Imagine Amazon trying to give all of their workers a 10% raise. With ~566,000 employees [3] making a median salary (sorry, could not find any mean or total amount so I'll pretend like it's the mean) of $28,446 [4], a 10% raise would amount to 566,000 * $28,446/10 = $1,610,043,600. This would more than slash their net income in half [5] and would only increase the median income by a modest $2800. Obviously these numbers aren't perfect because we don't have means or an accurate list of who earns what, but I think you can see my point here: if every Amazon employee earned a true "living wage", the company would probably go out of business pretty quickly. And that's a big deal when half a million people's lives rely on it (not to mention the millions of shareholders, many of whom likely own the stock as part of their pension plans). And that's not really in anybody's control. It's not like Jeff Bezos is the wealthiest person alive because he's making some massive salary and taking cash out of the company. His personal compensation was $1.68 million last year, most of which was the cost of his personal security team [4]. What makes him wealthy is all of his shares in Amazon, which is pretty worthless if he goes ahead and dumps all of it. Not to mention that his wealth often fluctuates by 10s of billions in a matter of days because of that.

>Migration isn't causing this but it useful for rich people with vested interests to make it seem like it is.

I can agree with you that blaming things on migration is often incorrect and used as a red herring, but the previous commenter is somewhat correct. Immigrants (both legal and illegal) often settle for much lower paying jobs or much harder labor because of how much it pays relative to what they would earn in their home country. This doesn't really cause most people to earn less money, because for the most part few "natural-born" Americans are willing to do those jobs, but it does increase the proportion of jobs that pay these tiny wages. There are certainly many American-born workers who are getting minuscule wages, but an even bigger percentage of these people are immigrants. Of course, it doesn't change the fact that people are getting paid those jobs in general, but for a vast majority of them something as simple as raising the minimum wage is just going to make their jobs go away.

[1] https://ycharts.com/companies/WMT/profit_margin

[2] https://ycharts.com/companies/AMZN/profit_margin

[3] https://www.geekwire.com/2018/amazon-now-employs-566000-peop...

[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2018-04-19/amazon-...

[5] https://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/amzn/financials?query=income-s...