Allowing poor immigrants into the country is not only a good decision morally (especially since American policies are partially to blame for their unemployment), but also economically.
This study suggests that it actually increases the income of the average US worker, expands the economy’s productive capacity, and that immigrants are not taking American jobs.
And as Kevin Drum comments:
What’s really striking about this is that the very mechanism that provides the productivity boost — the fact that immigrants don’t speak English well and therefore push native workers out of manual labor and into higher-paying jobs — is precisely the thing that most provokes the immigrant skeptics. They all want immigrants to assimilate faster and speak English better, but if they did then they’d just start competing for the higher paying jobs that natives now monopolize.
Filed under: Politics/International Affairs
