Alex Nowrasteh - The Most Common Arguments Against Immigration and Why Theyre Wrong

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Copyright 2021 by the Cato Institute.

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-952223-22-8

eISBN: 978-1-952223-23-5

Cover imagery: Getty Images

Book and graphics design: Ahmed Naushad.

Printed in the United States of America.

Cato Institute

1000 Massachusetts Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20001

www.cato.org

What are the best counter-arguments to common complaints about immigration?

Immigration has been the most hotly debated public policy issue in the United States since Donald Trump entered the Republican primary in mid-2015. His campaign for president began with a speech about the evils of illegal immigration. He went on to support drastic cuts to legal immigration and promised to build a wall along the border with Mexico. During his time in office, he did almost everything in his power as president to reduce legal immigration, build a border wall, and increase immigration enforcementwith only the resistance of American cities and states, unfavorable court rulings, Congresss unwillingness to support his policies, and his administrations own incompetence holding him back. A new Biden Administration has an opportunity to reverse the anti-immigration actions of the Trump Administration and expand legal immigration.

For more than a decade, my job has been to produce original research on the topic of immigration, to read hundreds of thousands of pages of other peoples research, and to debate opposing scholars in public and on various media. But the best preparation for the current immigration debate was listening to the questions and concerns of Americans who dont live in Washington, DC, or work in public policy. The major problem with patriotic correctness and political correctness is that many people rarely state their real objections to liberalized immigration for fear of being called racist, xenophobic, bigoted, ignorant, evil, or stupid. When the cost of asking questions and voicing objections rises, fewer questions and objections are raised publicly, but the underlying opinions dont change; they merely remain unanswered and can simmer.

This booklet attempts to answer the most common objections to immigration that Ive heard throughout my career from policy wonks and academics as well as from ordinary Americans. Few people can devote years of their life to studying the most relevant public policy questions and evidence for any issue. However, as one who has had that extraordinary privilege, Ive written this booklet that boils them down to the 15 most common objections and explains how I respond to them.

15 common myths about immigration

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Myth

Immigrants will take American jobs, lower wages, and especially hurt the poor.

FACT: Immigrants dont take American jobs, lower wages, or push the poor out of the labor market.

This most common argument has the greatest amount of evidence rebutting it. Economists look primarily at two effects of immigration on the labor market: whether immigrants push natives out of jobs (also known as the displacement effect) and whether immigrants lower the wages of native-born Americans or other immigrant workers. First, the so-called displacement effect is small, if it actually affects native-born workers at all. Immigrants are typically attracted to growing regions, and they increase the supply and demand sides of the economy once they are there. They expand employment opportunities for everybody.

Second, the debate over immigrants effects on American wages is confined to the lower single percentage points (

At worst, immigrants only negatively affect the wages of a small number of American workers while raising them for the rest.

Immigration increases the supply of workers in the economy, but the wage effects in As a result, there just isnt much competition between most Americans and most immigrants.

Figure 1. Long-run relative effect of immigration on wages of native-born citizens by education

Sources: Data from George Borjas,Immigration Economics(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 120; National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine,The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration, Table 8-14, 2017, pp. 23537; Gianmarco Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri, Rethinking the Effect of Immigration on Wages,Journal of the European Economic Association10, no. 1 (2012): 15297.

The second reason is that other differences, such as English language ability, mean that immigrants push some native-born workers into occupations where they can use their superior language skills while lower-skilled immigrants concentrate on manual labor occupations until they learn English. Communication-oriented jobs are more highly compensated than are manual labor jobs, so the net effect on wages of Americans is slightly positive. In a restaurant, for example, low-skilled immigrants are busboys and dishwashers because they cant effectively communicate with the customers, while low-skilled native-born Americans who speak English take the higher-paying jobs by becoming waiters and waitresses. Language differences incentivize each group to specialize and change jobs, which, as a result, raises wages for both.

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