Among the worries driving this year’s immigration debate is a fundamental fear that foreigners are stealing jobs from Americans.
Are immigrants, particularly illegal ones, taking jobs that unemployed American citizens could fill?
New research indicates that isn’t the case.
Business representatives, backed up by President Bush, argue that Americans “don’t want these jobs” and that they would go begging if it weren’t for the newcomers. Immigration opponents and some labor groups believe low-wage laborers are taking millions of opportunities from Americans, and some civil rights representatives believe that employers prefer to hire immigrants.
The Pew Hispanic Center, a respected research group, has released a new study that seems to indicate immigrants don’t hurt other workers, at least when the question is viewed at a national level. The study didn’t look at race and hiring, but in a previous poll done by the center, twice as many blacks as whites said they or a family member had lost a job, or not gotten a job, because an employer hired an immigrant.
Pew studied Census data from 1990 to 2004 and concluded, “No consistent pattern emerges” to show that native-born workers suffered from “increased numbers of foreign-born workers.” General economic growth played a larger role in the job market, the study suggested, also noting regional variations in how immigrants affected native-born workers.
(The study examined both legal and illegal immigrants. About 10 percent of the total U.S. workforce of 144 million is made up of legal immigrants, while illegal immigrants probably account for about another 5 percent of workers. The study didn’t examine the impact of immigrant labor on wage levels.)
Economists and advocates already are quibbling over the meaning of the study, but there is an overarching lesson to be learned from it: the simplistic soundbites we hear from politicians and interest groups are probably wrong. Immigrant employees have an enormous presence in the American workplace, yet their impact needs to be fully understood.
Congress needs to convene a sensible discussion about immigration, rather than running around the country having show hearings designed to shore up the campaigns of incumbents.
