Article Summary
The article challenges the belief that immigration negatively affects the jobs and wages of native-born and minority workers in the US. It cites numerous studies, including the Mariel Boatlift that brought 125,000 Cubans to Miami in 1980, which showed minimal impact on wages and employment of native-born workers. The article also highlights the role of immigrants as consumers, increasing demand for goods and services, thereby balancing out the impact on wages.
What This Means for You
- The argument that immigration harms native-born workers is not supported by empirical evidence, and immigrants are not solely competitors for jobs.
- Immigrants contribute to the economy as consumers, thereby increasing demand and offsetting the potential negative impact on wages.
- Policymakers should consider the broader economic benefits of immigration, including entrepreneurship and job creation, when making decisions about immigration policy.
- Anti-immigrant sentiments are often driven by cultural anxieties and misconceptions about immigrants, rather than economic concerns.
- Restrictive immigration policies may not lead to better outcomes for the working class.
Original Post
Donald Trump and his allies on the populist right believe they have a compelling argument for why the GOP is the true blue-collar party: Immigration is killing the American worker, and only Trump will put a stop to it. “Kamala Harris’s border invasion is also crushing the jobs and wages of African American workers and Hispanic American workers and also union members,” Trump declared at a recent rally. At other times, he has referred to immigration as “all-out economic warfare” on the working class. It’s a message that the former president repeats in one form or another at just about every one of his public appearances.
The argument carries a certain commonsense logic: Immigration means more workers competing for jobs, which translates to lower wages and employment rates for the native-born. During Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, Republican Senator J. D. Vance said that his boss’s proposal to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants would “be really good for our workers, who just want to earn a fair wage for doing a good day’s work.”
Mainstream Democrats used to vigorously dispute the notion that immigration hurt native-born workers. No longer. Today, the two major parties are jockeying to convince voters that they are the ones who will truly secure the border. To the extent that liberals still defend immigration, they often do so by arguing that deporting migrants would reduce the labor supply and send prices soaring again—an argument that implicitly accepts the premise that immigrants do in fact depress wages.
This is a tragedy. The effect of immigration on wages is one of the most thoroughly studied topics in empirical economics, and the results are clear: Immigrants do not make native-born workers worse off, and probably make them better off. In many domains, the conventional wisdom among progressives is mistaken, oversimplified, or based on wishful thinking. The economics of immigration is not one of them.
Econ 101 tells us that when the supply of a good, like labor, increases, then the price of that good falls. This is the lens through which economists viewed immigration for much of the 20th century: great for corporations (cheap labor) and consumers (lower prices) but bad for native-born workers. Then a study came along that shattered the consensus.
In 1980, Fidel Castro briefly lifted Cuba’s ban on emigration, leading 125,000 people, most of whom lacked a high-school education, to travel from Mariel Bay to Miami in what became known as the Mariel Boatlift. In a few months, Miami’s workforce expanded by about 25 times as much as the U.S. workforce expands because of immigration in a typical year, creating the perfect conditions for a natural experiment. The economist David Card later realized that if he compared Miami with cities that did not experience the boatlift, he could isolate the effect that immigration had on native-born earning power. If immigrants really did depress wages, then surely the effect would be visible in Miami in the 1980s.
Instead, in a paper published in 1990, Card found that the boatlift had virtually no effect on either the wages or employment prospects of native-born workers in Miami, including those who lacked a college degree. Economists have since used similar natural experiments to study the effect of immigration in countries including Key Terms
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