Immigrants Not Taking Your Job, Study Claims

No excuses!

​People who hate immigrants often hang their rhetorical hat on the argument that immigrants are stealing jobs from and depressing wages for people born here. Yet a new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco blows that theory apart.

Immigrants in the workforce increase the income and job opportunities for U.S.-born workers, who can take on more specialized, communication-based jobs, writes Giovanni Peri, an associate professor at U.C. Davis who is a visiting scholar at the bank.

The study is optimistic about the effect of immigrants on the workplace at a time when  anti-immigrant sentiment seems to be hitting a fever pitch with the passage of Arizona's "papers please" SB 1070. 

The study compared states that have a lot of immigrants -- like California (where one in three workers in foreign-born) -- to those with very few -- like West Virginia (where only one in 100 was foreign-born). It threw in a bunch of controls to make sure the findings weren't due to extraneous factors, and came up with the following claims: 

• Immigration to the U.S. betwen 1990 and 2007 brought about an increase in worker income of up to 9.9 percent, or about a $5,100 increase in the real income per worker.

• Since U.S. born-workers have better English skills than foreign-born workers, they tend to specialize into more communication-oriented positions, while immigrants pick up manual labor (no pun intended). 

• This increases wages for U.S.-born workers, as they become supervisors, coordinators, and designers, and leave the menial labor to foreign-born workers. The study used the example of a construction company that has immigrants performing the manually intensive construction work, allowing the U.S.-born workers to move into supervisorial positions with better wages. The production capacity of the hypothetical business increases along with the increased workforce.

• In summary, "...immigrants expand the U.S. economy's productive capacity, stimulate investment, and promote specialization that in the long run boosts productivity. Consistent with previous research, there is no evidence that these effects take place at the expense of jobs for workers born in the United States." 

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