The economic effects of immigration, even on low-skilled Americans, cannot be blamed for the economic decline of the middle class or the working poor.
“Immigration has at most only a small harmful effect on the native-born. If this were biology or astrophysics, that would be that — the media would accept the scientific consensus, until new research came along and overturned it. But this is economics, and so politics and ideology inevitably get in the way,” Noah Smith, an economist at Stony Brook University, wrote for Bloomberg.
That extends to economists who research immigration, too. The methods used by economists who find immigration to have negative effects differ from methods by economists who find immigration to have positive effects.
In spite of that, immigration as a positive have the upper hand. “The likelihood and magnitude of adverse labor market effects for natives from immigration are substantially weaker than often perceived,” Sari Kerr and William Kerr, economists at Wellesley College and Harvard, noted in a survey of immigration studies. Empirical research that finds negative effects from immigration relies on spurious correlations between wages and employment, rather than real-world effects of immigrant workers and economic growth.
Public opinion on immigration remains favorable, though the past decade has seen a partisan split. An April Pew survey found that Democrats think immigration has a positive effect, whereas Republicans have a Trump view of immigration. Somehow, immigrants are stealing jobs yet draining the welfare system, despite the economic evidence.
A generational split has emerged as well. Younger Americans favor immigration — 76 percent of millennials “say immigrants today strengthen the country because of their hard work and talents.” If the Republican Party doesn’t soften on immigration, or read the economic evidence before declaring immigration as an invasion, doubling down on a border wall with Mexico threatens its long-term appeal to millennials. It’s already struggling to accommodate millennials Republicans, let alone their non-inclined peers.
That threatens more than the party’s appeal. It also undermines long-term economic growth.
