States who have hiked their minimum wages high above those of surrounding states, never mind other nations, lose business.

To be fair, I suspect that this is less because of the higher wages (hardly anyone in America actually works for minimum wages) than because the governments of such states tend to be Democratic, and have the deep and abiding Democratic faith that human commerce is a cancer on the face of the Earth, and needs to be crippled and bound to as great an extent as possible.

In other words, states with much higher minimum wages than the average would also tend to be states that are actively hostile toward business in general. In that, Blair is probably making an erroneous direct connection where the real connection is more circumstantial.