STUDY: Immigration Fattens Our Paychecks, Makes us Richer

America's Voice Blog

Posted 09/01/10 at 12:49pm

A new study by the San Francisco Fed, highlighted by the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Reuters, provides state-level proof that immigrants, well, make us richer.

According to the author of the report:

[T]otal immigration to the United States from 1990 to 2007 was associated with a 6.6% to 9.9% increase in real income per worker. That equals an increase of about $5,100 in the yearly income of the average U.S. worker in constant 2005 dollars. Such a gain equals 20% to 25% of the total real increase in average yearly income per worker registered in the United States between 1990 and 2007.

The study is making the rounds in the blogosphere. Matt Yglesias writes, in “How Immigration Boosts Living Standards:”

When new workers come onto the scene and do jobs, they create more surplus. To get the kind of zero-sum effect that people think occurs when you get rid of immigrants, what you would actually need to do is send retirees to the Death Panels and turn them into Soylent Green.

Kevin Drum writes for Mother Jones in How Immigration Increases Your Pay:

What's really striking about this is that the very mechanism that provides the productivity boost — the fact that immigrants don't speak English well and therefore push native workers out of manual labor and into higher-paying jobs — is precisely the thing that most provokes the immigrant skeptics. They all want immigrants to assimilate faster and speak English better, but if they did then they'd just start competing for the higher paying jobs that natives now monopolize.

Colorlines’ Seth Freed Wessler writes in Study: Immigration Drives Wages Up, Actually:

The notion that immigrants threaten the economic well-being of US-born workers is a well worn refrain in the immigration restrictionist lexicon. For the moment it appears to have taken second fiddle to a set of attacks having to do mainly with immigrant criminality. But the jobs argument is not going anywhere anytime soon.

Wessler astutely concludes:

Whatever impact immigration has on the labor market—and the evidence is strong that it is a net positive—we’re likely going to keep hearing the same arguments cast and recast. That’s because the movement against immigration isn’t really about the jobs or about national security or about drugs or crime. It’s really about fear; about the mounting anxiety that shifting racial demographics will unsettle relationships of real or perceived power and privilege that are marked by race. And new numbers aren’t going to unsettle these anxieties.

Scores of studies have shown that fixing our broken immigration system would be an economic shot in the arm during tough times, yet fear has proven to have at least as much of a stranglehold on Congress as on Main Street, when it comes to the issue of immigration.

UPDATE: Perez Hilton weighs in with Immigration Is Good For The Economy!

While this issue is complicated, it seems as though allowing immigrants to continue to come in is the smarter choice economically. It’s good to remember that America has always been country of immigrants — it’s just that when it was first founded the people moving in came from Europe instead of the South America.

Also, where would America be if immigrants didn’t move here and introduce us to the wonders of burritos and salsa? That would be a sad, sad world.

A burrito sounds really good right now =)