Washington Post -- Max Ehrenfreund
With another contentious debate about immigration approaching for the new Congress, it's worth remembering that immigration doesn't benefit everyone equally. Immigrants are better off when they can come here freely, of course, and so are most people already in the country, who benefit from immigrants' skills and labor.
Theoretically, though, immigration could make life harder for workers with less skill and education if immigration reform forced those born in the United States to compete for jobs with other less-skilled workers from around the world.
For these reasons, David Frum worries that advocates of immigration reform are relying on wishful thinking, ignoring "the real world" and "actual observed data" about the plight of less-skilled, native-born workers.
In fact, there is abundant evidence from the real world about whether immigration changes wages for relatively uneducated native workers, or pushes them out of work. Yet while some research does find that immigration leaves native blue-collar workers worse off, the effects seem to be small.
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