Immigrants Fuel Job Gains, Not Losses in the United States
President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions often claim that immigrants take jobs from true “Americans.” A new study undermines that claim.
Immigrants are often used as convenient scapegoats for those feeling the economic pinch of joblessness. However, for at least the last 15 years, immigrants have not been a source of significant job competition for the native-born in the United States. A recent paper on the relationship between immigration and employment confirms this, finding that immigrants “did not even move the needle” when it came to job losses since 1999.
The paper found that there were about 11.4 million fewer workers by 2016 in the workforce. Half of this decline in total employment was a result of older workers aging out of the workforce; the other half was primarily the result of competition with China (imports from which have resulted in the loss of millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs) and the expansion of automation (workers being replaced by machines).
Despite what some would have you believe, the decline in native employment over the past 15 years was not the result of immigrants replacing native-born workers in the labor force. The authors emphasize that the notion of immigrants “stealing” jobs from native-born workers is inherently flawed. Immigrants and the native-born are not fighting over a fixed number of jobs in the U.S. economy, because the number is constantly changing.