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November 28, 2006
The workers who have been most affected by the massive influx of illegal immigrants into the United States over the past five years are low-skilled, young and native-born, according to a recent study.
"It appears that employers are substituting new immigrant workers for young, native-born workers," economists Andrew Sum, Paul Harrington and Ishwar Khatiwada wrote. "The negative impacts tended to be larger for in-school youth compared to out-of-school youth, and for native-born black and Hispanic males compared to their white counterparts."
The study was conducted by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University.
It concluded that the rise in immigrant employment — especially the hiring of illegal entrants — over the past decade has contributed to a breakdown in the nation's labor laws and labor standards, undermining the unemployment insurance and Social Security systems and basic worker protections that have evolved over the last century.
This study is one of the latest voices in a debate that stretches back decades, if not more than a century, concerning the effect that large-scale immigration has on those already here.
"There is a set of industries in all this that are big winners," Harrington said in an interview. "Those who lose are poor people, those without much access to education and other recent immigrants. When you bring in large numbers of illegal immigrants, what you do is break down the labor standards and create environments Americans don't want to work in."
Market forces lead employers to pay for labor at the lowest possible rate, and if a large number of workers is willing to work below the minimum wage or in environments that violate labor laws that the government is not enforcing, many employers will hire those workers. That means those who want work with government-mandated conditions are left out.
Harrington said labor-market statistics bear this out. From 2000 to last year, the number of native-born men who were employed fell by 1.7 million — even as the number of native young men and male teenagers went up. At the same time, the number of new male immigrant workers increased by 1.9 million. Of the 4.1 million new immigrant workers who got jobs in the United States between 2000 and last year, an estimated 1.4 million to 2.7 million are illegal entrants.
In this month's Foreign Affairs journal, Tamar Jacoby presents a contrary view: large amounts of immigration are necessary for expansion of the U.S. economy.
"It's not as simple as a supply and demand graph," Jacoby said. "If you didn't have those immigrants, those jobs wouldn't exist."
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