Immigration hurts unskilled workers

Jerry Kammer:

For decades, some experts have worried about the economic impact of the continuing mass influx of low-skill immigrants on all immigrants.

"Immigration of unskilled immigrants comes at a cost to unskilled U.S. workers, particularly established immigrants for whom new immigrants are economic substitutes," the congressionally mandated U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform concluded in 1997. The panel was headed at the time by Barbara Jordan, a civil rights leader and former U.S. representative from Texas. Jordan died in 1996.

Sustaining mass immigration of low-skill workers for several decades has increased profits for employers and lowered costs for consumers, but it also has undercut wages for those workers, said George Borjas, a professor of public policy at Harvard University.

"If we are concerned about the amount of income inequality in society and about the economic well-being of those at the bottom of the distribution, the current practice of importing large numbers of less-skilled workers will not do," he said.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Congress last year that the federal government, through immigration policy, can either expand or shrink the size of the nation's low-skill labor force. He suggested that restricting immigration might benefit those low-skill immigrants already in the United States.

"Employers would respond in two ways to a tighter labor market," said Krikorian, whose Washington-based organization calls for restrictions on immigration. "First, they would raise wages, increase non-cash benefits, and change working conditions in order to recruit and retain a sufficient work force.

"And second, they would look for ways of making their available workers more productive so as to make up for some of the jobs previously done by foreign labor," he said. "The result would be a smaller number of unskilled workers, each earning higher wages."

If liberals were really concerned about helping the poor - instead of just finding cheap domestic help - they would want to restrict immigration in order to raise the wages of the working poor.