http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2007/05/the_economics_of_immigrant_lab.phpAs Congress debates an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws, several economists and news media pundits have sounded the alarm, contending that immigrants are causing harm to Americans in the competition for jobs. But are they?
A more careful examination of the economic data suggests that the argument is, at the very least, overstated. There is scant evidence that illegal immigrants have caused any significant damage to the wages of American workers.
The number that has been getting the most attention lately was produced by George J. Borjas and Lawrence F. Katz, two Harvard economists, in a paper published last year. They estimated that the wave of illegal Mexican immigrants who arrived from 1980 to 2000 had reduced the wages of high school dropouts in the United States by 8.2 percent. But the economists acknowledge that the number does not consider other economic forces, such as the fact that certain businesses would not exist in the United States without cheap immigrant labor. If it had accounted for such things, immigration's impact would be likely to look less than half as big.
In their paper, they found;
* Over the last quarter-century, the number of people without any college education, including high school dropouts, has fallen sharply
* Businesses and other economic agents have adjusted to immigration, by making changes that have muted much of immigration's impact on American workers
* No wage differences could be attributed to the presence of illegal immigrants
Borjas said that while the numbers were not large, the impact at the bottom end of the skill range was significant. "It is not a big deal for the whole economy, but that hides a big distributional impact," he said.
Others disagree. "If you're a native high school dropout in this economy, you've got a slew of problems of which immigrant competition is but one, and a lesser one at that," said Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group.
FULL article at link.