There is one other way in which immigration, as it exists at present, influences crises. In considering this, it will be well to regard the crisis from the other point of view—as a phenomenon of underconsumption. Practically all production at the present day is to supply an anticipated future demand. There can be no overproduction unless the actual demand fails to equal that anticipated. This is underconsumption. Now the great mass of consumers in the United States is composed of wage earners. Their consuming power depends upon their wages. In so far as immigration lowers wages in the United States, or prevents them from rising, it reduces consuming power, and hence is favorable to the recurrence of periods of underconsumption. It is not probable, to be sure, that a high wage scale in itself could prevent crises, as the entrepreneurs would base their calculations on the corresponding consuming power, just as they do at present. But a high wage scale carries with it the possibility of saving, and an increase of accumulations among the common people. It is estimated at the present time that half of the industrial people of the United States are unable to save anything.[324] This increase in saving would almost inevitably have some effect upon the results of crises, though it must be confessed that it is very difficult to predict just what this effect would be. One result that might naturally be expected to follow would be that the laboring classes would take the opportunity of the period of low prices immediately following the crisis to invest some of their savings in luxuries which hitherto they had not felt able to afford. This would increase the demand for the goods which manufacturers are eager to dispose of at almost any price, and would thereby mitigate the evils of the depressed market. It is probably true that the immigrant, under the same conditions, will save more out of a given wage than the native, so that it might seem that an alien laboring body would have more surplus available for use at the time of a crisis than a native class. But the immigrant sends a very large proportion of his savings to friends and relatives in the old country, or deposits it in foreign institutions, so that it is not available at such a time. Moreover, our laboring class is not as yet wholly foreign, and the native has to share approximately the same wage as the alien. Without the immense body of alien labor, we should have a class of native workers with a considerably higher wage scale, and a large amount of savings accumulated in this country, and available when needed.