The Danger From Low-Skilled Immigrants: Not Having Them
In the states that received many such immigrants, less-educated American-born workers tended to shift out of lower-skilled jobs — like, say, fast-food cooks —
and into work requiring more communications skills, like customer-service representatives.
A critical insight of the new research into the impact of immigration is
that employers are not the only ones to adapt to the arrival of cheap foreign workers by, say, investing in a new restaurant or a new strawberry-packing plant.
“Immigrants who are relatively concentrated in less interactive
and more manual jobs free up natives to specialize in what they are relatively good at, which are communication-intensive jobs.”
Looking at data from 1940 through 2010, Jennifer Hunt, a professor of economics at Rutgers, concluded
that raising the share of less-skilled immigrants in the population by one percentage point increases the high school completion rate of Americans by 0.8 percentage point, on average, and even more for minorities.
Interestingly, the most vulnerable groups of American-born workers — men, the young, high school dropouts
and African-Americans — experienced a greater shift than other groups.
The millions of immigrants of little skill who swept into the work force in the 25 years up to the onset of the Great Recession — the men washing
dishes in the back of the restaurant, the women emptying the trash bins in office buildings — have largely improved the lives of Americans.
Immigrants take up a disproportionate share of many lower-skill occupations — such as
farm or janitorial work — as well as some higher-skill ones, like computer science.
