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High-immigration cheerleaders claim that we need immigration for our economy. But they ignore the detrimental effect that importing workers has on American workers, particularly low-skilled natives. In a supply and demand economy like ours, the more there is of something, the less value it has. By artificially inflating the number of workers in our country, immigration lowers the value of workers, and wages are depressed. As George Washington University economics professor Robert Dunn notes, “I know business people who tell me they’re not interested in hiring Americans because the people who come from outside are cheaper. But ... if there’s an unlimited supply of labor facing this country from outside, from the South or wherever, at five dollars an hour, I don’t care how fast this economy grows, the wage rate for such people is going to be five dollars an hour!”1

The Skill Levels of Most Immigrants Are Low.
Thanks to immigration laws that favor relatives instead of skilled workers, most of the immigrants being admitted are low-skilled. Out of all the adult immigrants admitted in 2000, 69 percent had no reported profession, occupation, or job at all.2 The average adult immigrant has only a ninth-grade education; more than a third of immigrants over 25 are not high school graduates.3
Claims That We Need Low-Skilled Workers Are False.
Some employers claim that they need to import low-skilled workers to compete in the world market, where wages are very low. But those employers have simply become dependent on cheap foreign labor to the detriment of American workers: “Network recruitment [of immigrants] not only excludes American workers from certain jobs; it also builds a dependency relationship between U.S. employers and Mexican sources that requires a constant infusion of new workers,” says economist Philip Martin.4 Such a strategy for our economy is doomed to failure anyway: “The low-wage strategy may work in the short run, but in the long run it’s a loser. In the long run, we are not going to win a wage-cutting contest with the Third World,” notes economist Vernon Briggs.5

Besides, the United States already has plenty of low-skilled native workers: “No technologically advanced industrial nation that has 27 million illiterate adults ... need have any fear about a shortage of unskilled workers in its foreseeable future.”6

The effects are most pronounced in the cities where immigrants go. High immigration cities have twice as much unemployment as low immigration cities.10 Because too much immigration keeps wages low, wage increases in low-immigration cities have been 48 percent higher than in high-immigration cities.11 Thus, immigration contributes to the growing disparity between the rich and the poor in this country 12 and the shrinking of the middle class.13 But the damage is not confined to high-immigration locales. The harm is carried to other cities when poor Americans whose wages have been depressed or who have been displaced from their jobs by immigration move to low-immigration areas in search of greener pastures.14

Wages Are Lowered By Competition From Immigrants.
The effect of immigration on those low-skilled Americans is profound, and the government knows it: “Undoubtedly access to lower-wage foreign workers has a depressing effect [on wages],” says former Labor Secretary Robert Reich.7 Research suggests that between 40 and 50 percent of wage-loss among low-skilled Americans is due to the immigration of low-skilled workers.8 Some native workers lose not just wages but their jobs through immigrant competition. An estimated 1,880,000 American workers are displaced from their jobs every year by immigration; the cost for providing welfare and assistance to these Americans is over $15 billion a year.9

Large-Scale Immigration of Low-Skilled Workers Must Be Stopped.
In short, the mass importation of low-skilled workers through immigration damages the job market for Americans, depresses wages for low-skilled natives, and costs the taxpayer billions a year-all for the benefit of businesses that have become dependent on cheap, foreign labor. An immigration system that admits too many people, without regard to their skill levels or impact on the labor force, is to blame. We must reform the immigration laws to lower the level of annual immigration and to ensure that those immigrants who are admitted complement, not compete, with our native labor force.