Economics of Immigration

Myth: Foreign low wage workers depress the wages of U.S. workers.
Fact: Immigrants don’t have a negative impact on the majority of native born workers, and often exact a positive impact.

• The primary reason that immigrants don’t have a negative impact on the majority of native-born workers is that they aren’t competing for the same jobs.
• The U.S. population is growing older and better educated, while the U.S. economy continues to create a large number of low skill jobs that favor younger workers with little formal education. As a result, immigrants increasingly are filling jobs at the less-skilled end of the occupational spectrum for which relatively few native-born workers are available.
• Even among workers with the same level of formal education, the foreign-born tend to be employed in different occupations than U.S. natives. Less-educated foreign-born workers, for instance, are found mostly in agricultural and personal service jobs, while less-educated natives are found mostly in manufacturing and mining.
• Immigration raised the average wage of the native-born worker by 1.1 percent during the 1990s. Among native-born workers with a high-school diploma or more education, wages increased between 0.8 percent and 1.5 percent.
• Since workers with different levels of education perform different tasks and fill different roles in production, the majority of native-born workers (those with intermediate educational levels) experience benefits, more than competition, from foreign-born workers concentrated in high and low educational groups.

Published On: Tue, Jan 01, 2008 | Download File

Includes information on immigrants' language acquisition, tax payments, and effects on U.S. workers and the U.S. labor market.

Published On: Fri, Feb 01, 2008 | Download File

NUMBERS:    Opponents of a more robust H-1B program declare that immigrant workers, particularly high skill workers, displace U.S. workers and drive down the wages of those workers.  In many areas of the country, however, businesses are encountering something quite different:  that there simply are not enough qualified, high skill U.S. workers to fill the needs of U.S. employers.  High skill foreign professionals are therefore essential in filling these needs and complementing the native born workforce.  Read more...

Published On: Tue, Jan 01, 2008 | Download File

Information on the impact of DHS's rule on U.S. citizens, authorized workers, and the economy.

Published On: Fri, Mar 21, 2008 | Download File

A report released on June 20, 2007, by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) argues that the increase in the number of less-educated immigrant workers in Georgia between 2000 and 2006 causedemployment levels among less-educated natives to decline. However, there is no evidence of a direct, negative relationship between employment levels for immigrants and natives in Georgia.

Published On: Fri, Jun 22, 2007 | Download File

The debate over how many immigrants should be permitted to enter the country each year under a new temporary worker program is clouded by a common misconception: that the greater the number of temporary workers admitted, the greater the downward pressure on the wages of native-born workers. However, this assumption is not supported by the facts.

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Published On: Tue, Jun 05, 2007 | Download File

As the debate over illegal immigration continues to rage, some pundits and policymakers are claiming that unauthorized immigrants do not pay taxes and rely heavily on government benefits.  Neither of these claims is borne out by the facts. Undocumented men have work force participation rates that are higher than other workers, and all undocumented immigrants are ineligible for most government services, but pay taxes as workers, consumers, and residents.

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Published On: Thu, Nov 01, 2007 | Download File

Tax Day would seem to be an appropriate time to inject some bottom-line reality into the long-running debate over whether or not immigrants in the United States “pay their own way” as taxpayers.   As with nearly all aspects of the immigration debate, the controversy over how immigrants impact the public treasury is far too often dominated by emotionally charged rhetoric rather than hard facts.  Many of these much-needed facts are provided in a forthcoming report from the Immigration Policy Center by Stephen Moore, Senior Economics Writer at the Wall Street Journal and former director of Fiscal Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, and Richard Vedder, Distinguished Professor of Economics at Ohio University.  Using data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2005 Current Population Survey and other sources, Moore and Vedder find that immigrants not only pay their own way in taxes, but play a hefty role in shoring up the teetering Social Security system, and provide a fiscal windfall to U.S. taxpayers by tending to come to the United States during their prime working years—after the costs of their education and upbringing have been borne by their home countries. Read more...

Published On: Sat, Apr 12, 2008 | Download File

While the U.S. government has poured billions upon billions of dollars into immigration enforcement, the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States has increased dramatically. Rather than reducing undocumented immigration, this enforcement-without-reform strategy has diverted the resources and attention of federal authorities to the pursuit of undocumented immigrants who are drawn here by the labor needs of our own economy.

Published On: Thu, May 22, 2008 | Download File

According to new estimates from the Pew Hispanic Center, the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States did not increase between 2007 and 2008, and may actually have fallen. These findings should come as no surprise given the current state of the economy.

Published On: Wed, Oct 01, 2008 | Download File