Does Immigrant Labor Hurt or Complement the Native-Born Workforce?

Those who advocate that immigrants negatively affect job prospects for native-born workers, and those who argue the inverse as well, have a notably difficult case to make in reference to the “facts on the ground.” Though many economists agree that immigrant workers seem to have a net positive influence on the national economy, when we zoom in on the particulars, we often see an entirely different scenario. Of course, before we go any further we must, here, better define what we mean by “immigrants”---do we mean legal immigrants or illegal immigrants, high-skill or low-skill immigrants? Furthermore, when we talk about the maleficent or beneficent effect of immigration on the workforce, do we speak of specialized jobs, particular professions, low-skill/minimum wage jobs, or jobs as a whole?

For the most part, those who find cause to dislike (perhaps a weak word to use here, but it will suffice) the effect of immigrants on the native-born relates to the negative effect of immigrants on native-born low-skill workers, usually those who lack or have at maximum a high school diploma or GED. Here, a compelling case could be made for the negative effect of immigration on natives. Of course, in particular we likely mean here the effect of undocumented immigrants because this demographic would be the most likely to potentially depress wages in the low-skill labor market. Why? Because undocumented immigrants don’t have the “safety net” that native-born workers have if they can’t find a job.

The influence of incentives and disincentives---which differ for both native-born and undocumented demographics, and which is largely ignored in immigration debates---inescapably affects the labor market. Undocumented workers have a strong incentive to work at a lower wage because, if they fail to find work, they will have no access to social welfare programs that would supplement their income. Natives, however, don’t have so strong an incentive to accept lower-wage work---in fact they have a disincentive---and for two reasons: 1) Native-born workers have access to social welfare, and 2) social welfare, as is, creates greater incentive for using it rather than lower-wage work because the “wage” earned for joblessness is often comparable to the wage earned, after taxes, from many low-wage labor or service industry jobs. The fact that undocumented workers, since they lack citizenship and certain worker's “rights,” and thus are more at risk for being taken advantage of by certain employers who might prefer the cheaper and often times unregulated labor of undocumented immigrants, is also a problem worth mentioning in relation to the depression of wages purportedly incurred by undocumented immigrants upon their entrance in the workforce.

Of course, there are other factors to consider in this debate as well, such as the increasing number of native-born citizens pursuing undergraduate, graduate, doctorate, or professional degrees. Even though, yes, there are certain low-skill native-born workers who are at a disadvantage in the labor market because of the arrival and competition of undocumented workers, the decreasing rate of native-born low-skill workers in labor or service industry jobs is also related to the increasing percentage of educated and specialized/skilled native-born workers in relation to low-skilled, uneducated native-born workers. Indeed, pursuing an education not only offers the chance of finding a higher paying job in a specialized field, the pursuit itself keeps many people, particularly young men who would at their age normally pursue low-skill labor and service industry jobs, out of the workforce. Many immigrants, and many undocumented immigrants, too, are filling the void being left by a more educated native-born population that is seeking higher skill, higher paying jobs.

It may be that undocumented immigrants do make finding and keeping a low-skill labor or service industry job more difficult for some native-born citizens, but these other factors---welfare, increasing levels of education among the native-born, and various other factors that I’ve not discussed such as changes in the sorts of low-skill jobs available, the outsourcing of most industry/factory jobs, and the creation of new sorts of agricultural, service, and manual labor jobs---are also having an impact. To blame the depression of wages and lack of employment for native-born citizens on undocumented immigration alone is to ignore the bigger effects that a global economy, where capital and goods are free to flow across borders, has in a world where labor, which naturally flows with capital and production, is, at least legally, prevented from flowing with the capital.