Immigrant Bashers Take Note: Immigrants Create More Jobs

Creating fear is one route to political power.  Too often we have seen gay people, immigrants, and lately followers of Islam targeted with totally inaccurate statements in order to stir the pot and create tensions.  With those tensions there are politicians who hope to reap the benefits.

One of the persistent statements that gets ginned around is the notion that immigrants ars somehow taking another person’s job.  Over and over that has been debunked, and still it finds more oxygen to keep on going. 

Today some economists weigh in on the issue.  In spite of those predisposed to not wanting the facts, I post the results of the latest research all the same.

Over all, it turns out that the continuing arrival of immigrants to American shores is encouraging business activity here, thereby producing more jobs, according to a new study. Its authors argue that the easier it is to find cheap immigrant labor at home, the less likely that production will relocate offshore.

The study, “Immigration, Offshoring and American Jobs,” was written by two economics professors — Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano of Bocconi University in Italy and Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis — along with Greg C. Wright, a Ph.D. candidate at Davis.

The study notes that when companies move production offshore, they pull away not only low-wage jobs but also many related jobs, which can include high-skilled managers, tech repairmen and others. But hiring immigrants even for low-wage jobs helps keep many kinds of jobs in the United States, the authors say. In fact, when immigration is rising as a share of employment in an economic sector, offshoring tends to be falling, and vice versa, the study found.

In other words, immigrants may be competing more with offshored workers than with other laborers in America.

As a nation, we spend far too much time and energy worrying about foreigners. We also end up with more combative international relations with our economic partners, like Mexico and China, than reason can justify. In turn, they are more economically suspicious of us than they ought to be, which cements a negative dynamic into place.

The current skepticism has deadlocked prospects for immigration reform, even though no one is particularly happy with the status quo. Against that trend, we should be looking to immigration as a creative force in our economic favor. Allowing in more immigrants, skilled and unskilled, wouldn’t just create jobs. It could increase tax revenue, help finance Social Security, bring new home buyers and improve the business environment.