A report carried out by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in the United States has found that immigrants do not take jobs away from local workers.
The report found that immigration has an overall positive impact on economic growth in the United States, and has little to no impact on wage growth or job prospects for those born in the US.
In fact, it revealed that an inflow of skilled immigrants may even force wages higher for some subgroups of native-born workers.
“The panel’s comprehensive examination revealed many important benefits of immigration – including on economic growth, innovation, and entrepreneurship – with little to no negative effects on the overall wages or employment of native-born workers in the long term,” said Francine Blau, a Cornell University economics professor who chaired the panel that wrote the report.
“Where negative wage impacts have been detected, native-born high-school dropouts and prior immigrants are most likely to be affected,” she added.
The report, which looked at economic and demographic trends in the United States over the past 20 years, did find some drawbacks in the economic impacts of immigration. It found that new immigrants generally have a negative impact on the budgets of state and local governments – primarily because of the cost of public education for their children compared to their own lower wages.
However, it also found that those children, once they are educated and enter the American workforce, become greater contributors to the economy and tax revenue than their parents as well as the rest of the native-born population.
“The prospects for long-run economic growth in the United States would be considerably dimmed without the contributions of high-skilled immigrants,” the report said. It added that immigration is “integral to the nation’s economic growth” because immigrants bring new ideas and add to an American labor force that would be shrinking without them, helping ensure continued growth into the future.
Article published 22nd September 2016