Immigrants take jobs from native workers

What we know

The claim that immigrants take jobs that would otherwise go to native-born workers rests on a "fixed pie" assumption: that the number of jobs in an economy is constant, so every job filled by an immigrant is a job denied to someone else. Labor economists have tested this empirically for decades and generally reject the fixed pie model. A comprehensive 2017 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, reviewing decades of research, concluded that immigration has little to no negative effect on the overall wages or employment of native-born workers in the long run, and that immigrants also create jobs, through consumer spending, entrepreneurship, and complementary labor that increases the productivity of native workers rather than simply substituting for them.

Economist David Card's influential study of the 1980 Mariel boatlift, in which roughly 125,000 Cuban immigrants arrived in Miami over a few months, a sudden, large labor supply shock, found no significant negative effect on wages or unemployment for native workers, including low-skilled workers who would be expected to compete most directly with the new arrivals. Subsequent research, including studies of larger historical migration waves in the United States and Europe, has produced a similar overall pattern, some localized and short-term wage pressure in specific low-skill sectors, but no broad-based job displacement.

Immigrants disproportionately fill roles in sectors with persistent labor shortages, agriculture, construction, caregiving, and food processing among them, jobs that in many cases go unfilled by native-born workers even at higher wages, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics vacancy data and industry reports from these sectors. Immigrants are also more likely than native-born citizens to start new businesses, according to Kauffman Foundation and Census Bureau entrepreneurship data, generating jobs rather than only occupying them. High-skilled immigration, including through visas tied to STEM fields, has additionally been linked in economic research to increased patenting and innovation, indirectly expanding the labor market rather than shrinking it.

None of this means immigration has zero distributional effects. Some studies, notably by economist George Borjas, argue that earlier native workers without a high school diploma, competing most directly with low-skilled immigrant labor, may see modest wage suppression in specific local labor markets, an effect other economists dispute in magnitude but not entirely in direction. The mainstream empirical consensus is that these effects, where they exist, are small, localized, and outweighed by the broader economic gains from increased labor supply, consumer demand, and innovation, which is why major professional bodies of economists do not treat "immigrants steal jobs" as an accurate characterization of immigration's net labor market effect. Research comparing regions with different levels of immigration inflow over multi-decade periods, including studies using European data following the 2004 and 2007 European Union enlargements, has similarly found limited evidence of large-scale native job displacement, reinforcing the broader international pattern found in U.S.-focused research.

Common claims

• Every job taken by an immigrant is a job lost by a native workerFalse. Immigrants also create demand, start businesses, and expand economic output, generating additional jobs.
• Immigration has no negative effects on any group of workersOversimplification. NBER research documents that younger and lower-skilled native workers in nontradable sectors face real competitive pressure.
• Immigration is purely a fiscal drainFalse. National Academies 2016 review found first-generation net costs are offset by strongly positive second-generation fiscal contributions.

Evidence hierarchy

All sources

• The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of ImmigrationNational Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine · 2017
• The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor MarketDavid Card, Industrial and Labor Relations Review · 1990
• Foreign-born workers in the U.S. labor forceU.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics · 2023
• Immigrant entrepreneurship researchKauffman Foundation · 2022

Related terms