Champions of strict immigration reform, be warned: there may be an economic consequence to tightening America's borders.
Immigration is actually good for employment, wages and productivity, according to a new study from the San Francisco Fed.
States that have had a large influx of immigrants tended to produce more, hire more and pay workers more than states that have few new foreign-born workers, the study shows. For every one percent increase in employment from immigration, the study finds, a state will see a .4 to .5 percent increase in income per worker.
In conducting the study, Giovanni Peri, an associate professor at University of California, Davis, compared output per worker and employment in states that have had large immigrant inflows with data from states that have few immigrant inflows. Peri found no evidence that immigrants "crowd-out" employment for American citizens.
Peri concludes that immigration boosted states' output, income and employment because the economies "[absorbed] immigrants by expanding job opportunities rather than by displacing workers born in the United States." Further, the results of the study support the theory that U.S.-born workers and immigrants tend to take different occupations, says Peri.
The study uses a hypothetical illustration to explain:
"As young immigrants with low schooling levels take manually intensive construction jobs, the construction companies that employ them have opportunities to expand. This increases the demand for construction supervisors, coordinators, designers, and so on. Those are occupations with greater communication intensity and are typically staffed by U.S.-born workers who have moved away from manual construction jobs. This complementary task specialization typically pushes U.S.-born workers toward better-paying jobs, enhances the efficiency of production, and creates jobs."
Check out a brief of the study at the NBER's website. (The full study is available for purchase.)