Senior fellow Charles Kenny discusses immigration in the U.S. in his weekly Foreign Policy column and mentions research by senior fellow Michael Clemens.
From the Article:
Conversely, for humans, the net effect of immigration has been to create more jobs for native workers -- and especially low-skilled workers -- according to a 2010 analysis by economists Gianmarco Ottaviano, Giovanni Peri, and Greg Wright. That's because human immigrants boost demand for the output of other humans by doing jobs that would otherwise be outsourced abroad, producing goods for export, and spending money in the local market. Again, Peri compiles statistics from across U.S. states, finding that there is no evidence that immigrants crowd out native unskilled employment -- and considerable evidence that they actually increase productivity: Each 1 percent increase in employment due to immigrants is associated with a half-percent rise in state income per worker between 1960 and 2006.
Other studies suggest a somewhat less positive picture when it comes to low-skilled immigrants -- and in particular, their impact on low-skilled native-born Americans. But according to Harry Holzer of Georgetown University, the workers most likely to suffer competition at the hands of low-skilled immigrants are previous immigrants who have similar skills. Holzer also notes that both high- and low-income consumers alike benefit from the lower prices and greater availability of food, medical care, and housing that low-skilled immigrant workers produce. Meanwhile, David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, who studies inequality in American cities, argues that immigrants' impact on inequality is "modest." The real reasons for opposition to immigration, he reasons, must be social rather than economic.
From a global perspective, it is unfortunate that cows get treated so much better at the border than people. Migration is pretty much the fastest and most reliable method for improving quality of life in the human population. Work by my colleague Michael Clemens at the Center for Global Development suggests that the same worker with the same skills doing the same job can earn six times more in the United States than in India, for example. Eight out of 10 Haitians worldwide who are living on more than $10 a day are living in the United States, leaving less than one-fifth of those relatively high earners living in Haiti itself. A lot of the income that Haitian immigrants are earning -- $1.5 billion-plus a year -- is sent home in the form of remittances. Meanwhile, immigration is a considerably more uncertain path to quality of life for foreign cows, many of whom are destined for the slaughterhouse.