There are a lot of competing studies (and pundits) out there, but the general takeaway from conservative and liberal economists is that immigration is good for Americans’ living standards over the long run. That’s because immigrants raise the wages of native-born workers (and also lower the cost of immigrant-dense services like child care and cleaning).
As scholars at the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project explained recently, immigrants and native-born workers are generally complements, rather than perfect substitutes: lower-skilled immigrants largely sort into farming and other manual, low-paid jobs that the native-born don’t want to do, and higher-skilled immigrants provide labor that high-tech companies cannot find enough trained American-born workers.
As a result, immigration creates new job opportunities for the native-born, with some particularly high-profile examples found in Silicon Valley. According to a Kauffman Foundation study, of the engineering and technology companies founded in the United States from 2006 to 2012, 24.3 percent had at least one key founder who was foreign-born. In Silicon Valley alone, this number was 43.9 percent. Even outside of Silicon Valley, entrepreneurship rates are higher for the foreign-born than the native-born, and start-ups are the greatest source of American job growth.
Academic research suggests that, over all, immigrants create modest but positive average wage increases from 0.1 percent to 0.6 percent for American workers, according to Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney, both of the Hamilton Project.
Choosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor from
via Are Immigrants Taking Your Job? A Primer – NYTimes.com.
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