Immigration Increases Native Wages Regardless of Education Level
Posted by Maina B. on Mon, Feb 22, 2010
The Economic Policy Institute, an independent nonprofit nonpartisan D.C. think tank, released a new study entitled Immigration and Wages, which reinforces the results from previous studies that "immigration has a small but positive impact on the wages of native-born workers overall." Overall, economist Heidi Shierholz concludes in the study that the "effect of immigration from 1994 to 2007 raised the wages of U.S.-born workers, relative to foreign-born workers at all levels of education, including those with less than a high-school education." While there is broad agreement among economists that immigration has a small, positive effect on the average wages of native-born workers, they remain divided over the effects of immigration on specific groups of U.S. workers (particularly those with low levels of education).
The study findings challenge the popular assumption that "one worker's job gain is another worker's job loss," and assert that immigrant workers are not perfect substitutes for U.S.-born workers (even with the same education levels). The EPI reports that foreign-born and native-born workers actually "complement" each other through differing skills/abilities they possess and bring to the workplace. Thus, immigrants tend to fill particular niches in the U.S. labor market and therefore are not competing with most natives for the same jobs. Conversely, the EPI report finds that recent immigration actually has adverse effects on those workers who are the "most substitutable for new immigrants - earlier immigrants".
Further, the study substantiates that the plight of low-wage native-born workers should not be blamed on immigration, and that the "declining job quality for the least-educated American workers is due to a host of factors aside from immigration, including declining unionization rates, the eroding real value of the minimum wage, and trade practices that expose U.S. workers with low levels of education to competition from much lower wage workers around the globe."
By: Maina B.
Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/billselak/