Sudden growth in the U.S. immigrant population since shortly before the pandemic has had a positive impact on the wages of U.S. citizens, according to a newly released report.
Nonprofit research group the National Bureau of Economic Research debuted findings from two economists that concluded the introduction of new workers into the United States did not take away jobs or lower the wages of U.S. citizens, but rather to the contrary.
“Our estimates establish that immigrants have a substantial degree of productive complementarity with natives,” stated NBER report authors Alessandro Caiumi and Giovanni Peri. “This offsets the competition effect, resulting in a boost of native wages and in an increase of natives’ employment-population ratio in response to inflows for most native workers.”
David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, said the findings were “consistent” with decades of peer-reviewed research into how immigration affects existing workers in the country.
“It also confirms that there are not a fixed number of jobs in the economy, so U.S. workers should not fear immigrant competition,” Bier wrote in an email. “Economic theory predicts that as this research confirms, immigrants will increase both the supply of labor and demand for labor, and that the net effect will be to improve the standard of living of workers.”
However, a scholar at the conservative-leaning Center for Immigration Studies, also in Washington, suggested that the key variant in the impact of immigration on the economy and workers was in the type of immigrants.
The paper states that since 2000, newly arriving immigrants increasingly were college-educated compared to immigrants arriving in the U.S. in the past.
“Their complementarity with skilled natives was large enough not to harm, but rather to boost the wages of less educated American workers,” the NBER paper stated.
With more college grads working in the country, it was more likely to push U.S. citizens to “upgrade and specialize” in terms of work to set themselves apart from competition.
Dr. Jason Richwine, CIS resident scholar, said that while immigration over the past two decades may have proven beneficial to Americans, the latest immigration trend over the past several years has been the addition of low-skilled immigrants.
More than 9 million immigrants have attempted to enter the U.S. unlawfully at the southern border since President Joe Biden took office in 2021.
“Even taking the results at face value, the paper is clear that high-skill immigration creates most of the benefits for natives. By contrast, most of the new entrants at the Southern border are low-skill,” Richwine said in an email.
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“There is a vast literature showing that low-skill immigrants reduce the wages of similar natives,” Richwine continued.
Report authors Caiumi and Peri maintained that between 2000 and 2020, immigration improved wages and job availability for less-educated U.S. citizens, leaving the impact of the Biden border crisis yet to be seen on lower-income workers.
