The idea that immigration has a negative impact on the U.S. job market
is a common theme of former President Donald Trump’s speeches on the presidential campaign trail.
“They’re taking your jobs,” the Republican nominee told supporters on Sept. 21 in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Immigration is also a top issue for Republican voters: 82% of Trump
supporters say immigration is “very important” to their vote in the 2024 presidential election, second only to the economy, according to the Pew Research Center. It’s the lowest-priority issue for Democrats, Pew found.
However, evidence suggests immigrants help the overall economy. And, at
a high level, they aren’t taking jobs from or reducing the wages of
U.S.-born (or so-called native) workers, according to economists who
study the impact of immigration on the labor market.
“Overall, the consensus is very strong that there are not significant
costs to U.S.-born workers from immigration, at least the type of
immigration we have historically had in the U.S.,” said Alexander Arnon, director of business tax and economic analysis at the Penn Wharton
Budget Model.
There are several reasons why immigrants largely benefit the economy and
job market, economists said.
Immigrants take jobs but they also create new ones by spending in local economies and by starting businesses, economists said. One 2020 research
paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found immigrants are
80% more likely to become entrepreneurs than native workers.
A recent “surge” of immigrants to the U.S. is expected to add $8.9
trillion (or 3.2%) to the nation’s GDP over the next decade, according
to the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan scorekeeper for Congress.
Immigrants also aren’t perfect substitutes for U.S. citizens in many job positions; in fact, the two groups often complement each other rather
than compete, economists said.
However, some economic research suggests immigration can impact the
wages of certain subgroups of U.S.-born workers, especially those with
lower levels of educational attainment.
Some economists contend an influx of immigrants can reduce wages for
such Americans in the short term, though other researchers have found
that Americans ultimately benefit, partly because those in direct
competition with immigrants are able to find higher-paying jobs.
A big supply of new labor due to immigration can be “difficult and anxiety-inducing” for American workers who must adjust, he added.
“But people end up in better circumstances,” he said.
Immigration helped cool ‘overheated’ job market
The influx has been beneficial for the pandemic-era economy, economists
said.
It “helped cool an overheated labor market” over the past two years,
Elior Cohen, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City,
wrote in May.
In this sense, immigrants weren’t competing with U.S. citizens for jobs
but instead taking a surplus of available jobs, said Giovanni Peri, an economics professor and director of the Global Migration Center at the University of California, Davis.
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, economists from varying sides of the
debate published a “consensus” viewpoint in 2017 on the job market
effect of immigration, Clemens said.
The panel of economists found “little evidence that immigration
significantly affects” overall employment levels among Americans, they
wrote for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
“I’d say the consensus has gotten [even] stronger” since then.
To the extent there’s job competition from new immigrants, it tends to
fall mostly on prior immigrants rather than native U.S. workers,
according to the National Academies paper.
Prior immigrants are most likely to experience “negative wage effects,”
it said.
However, native-born high school dropouts may experience that effect, as
well, since they “share job qualifications similar to the large share of low-skilled [immigrant] workers,” the National Academies paper said.
One influential — and controversial — paper by Harvard economist George Borjas echoes that finding about high school dropouts.
Borjas — who was among the more than three dozen economists who authored
the National Academies consensus paper — studied the Mariel boatlift, a
mass emigration of 125,000 Cuban refugees to South Florida from April to October 1980.
At least 60% of these “Marielitos” were high school dropouts, he said. Borjas found that the large boost in labor supply caused the wages of
high school dropouts in Miami to drop “dramatically,” by 10% to 30%.
Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser during the Trump administration,
cited the paper in 2017 as a justification for a new proposal to curtail
legal immigration, particularly among lower-skilled workers.
Borjas’ finding was in contrast with earlier work by economist and Nobel laureate David Card, who had found the Mariel boatlift didn’t increase unemployment or negatively affect wages of “less-skilled” non-Cuban or Cuban workers.
Some economists, including Clemens, dispute Borjas’ findings. Borjas
didn’t return a request for comment.
“Sudden surges of immigration obviously affect the ability of native
workers to find and take jobs on a given afternoon,” Clemens said.
But immigrants “also create jobs,” Clemens said. “A large preponderance of evidence is the job creation effect overwhelms the competition
effect, even in the short term.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/28/are-immigrants-taking-jobs-from-us-workers-heres-what-economists-say.html
Icebear would call this a win-win.
--
"And off they went, from here to there,
The bear, the bear, and the maiden fair"
-- Traditional
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