Do immigrants take jobs away from Americans?
Imagine a world where there is a finite amount of work to be done, regardless of the size of the population. In this world, it's pretty easy to say that any increase in population reduces the amount of work per capita. If society hoped to keep its residents fully employed, it would do whatever it could to limit population growth. Restricting immigration is the easy way to do it, but nations that have sought to limit their population have resorted to much more nefarious policies than that.
We don't live in a world, or more specifically a nation, where there is a finite amount of work to be done.
First off, the amount of work to be done in most industries depends directly on the size of the population. The education and health sectors now account for nearly one-quarter of the jobs in the American economy, and demand for education and health rises directly with population. Construction jobs (6% of the workforce) depend in large part on how many new houses we need to build. Retail trade jobs (11% of the workforce) depend on the number of customers available. Transportation jobs (5% of the workforce) depend on how many people and things need transporting. Even much of the manufacturing industry (10% of the workforce, down from 16% two decades ago) ties directly to population size. There are more American jobs in food and beverage manufacturing than there are in the motor vehicle, aircraft, ship building, furniture, apparel, steel, farm machinery, computer and peripheral, electrical equipment, and household appliance manufacturing industries combined.
Your standard economics-101 view of the labor market, where the demand curve slopes down and thus any infusion of new workers lowers wages, doesn't tell the whole story. Immigrants increase both the supply of labor and the demand for labor. Think about it this way. Would your job be more or less secure if the population of your community suddenly plunged by 13%? That's the difference between having and lacking immigrants in the typical American community.
The second key point to consider is that when immigrants don't take jobs, there is no guarantee that the job will be made available to a native instead. In the manufacturing industry and elsewhere, employers have moved millions of jobs abroad in the past few decades. Had it not been for immigration, they would have moved even more. Adding an extra 1,000 immigrants to the economy keeps 46 manufacturing jobs here in the United States.
The third reason immigrants don't take jobs from Americans is that they are disproportionately likely to create their own. And when immigrants start their own business, they often end up creating more jobs for others.
The key statistic to understanding how immigration benefits native employment is to consider the impact of immigration on native population. If immigrants took American jobs, we'd see a pattern whereby an inflow of immigrants to a community led natives to leave in response. In fact, we see the opposite pattern. For every 1,000 immigrants who enter a county, the native population of that county increases by about 270. If you're looking to see where opportunities are in the United States today, find a place where immigrants are.
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