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White to move and mate in two #648 - Poverty, by America [1]
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Date: 2025-04-03
But has their success come at the expense of other workers? Do immigrants compete with native-born Americans, driving down wages and pulling more people into poverty? The best research we have on this question finds that the long-term impact of immigration on wages is quite small, and its impact on employment is even smaller. If immigrants competed with native-born workers for jobs, this finding would be head-scratching, even dubious, but immigrants mainly compete with other immigrants for jobs, which means the workers most threatened by new arrivals are older arrivals.27 For many Americans, wages have stagnated, but immigrants are not to blame.
Undocumented immigration has slowed in recent years. The push factors have waned, thanks to an aging population and stabilizing economy in Mexico, and the push back factors have grown stronger with increasingly militant border enforcement. The politicians who ring their hands about “the border crisis” know full well that the undocumented population peaked over fifteen years ago, in 2007. Yet employers have not responded to a shrinking undocumented workforce by hiring native-born workers at competitive wages. Instead, they have responded by automating their jobs (using machines instead), hiring other immigrants, like those on H-2A visas (Americans don’t exactly queue up for immigrant jobs), or simply closing up shop.28
Regardless of their impact on the labor market, immigrants could make a country poorer by relying heavily on welfare benefits. But the poorest immigrants are undocumented, which makes them ineligible for many federal programs, including food stamps, non-emergency Medicaid, and Social Security. Over a typical lifetime, an immigrant will give more to the U.S. government in taxes than he or she will receive in federal welfare benefits.29 Even if the opposite were true, the impact immigrants would have on overall government spending would be utterly, even comically, trivial compared to the stress the American upper class places on the welfare state. But I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, it’s enough to concede that America’s dismal track record on poverty reduction cannot be blamed on its immigrant workforce.
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