Businessweek reports on a new research by economist Gianmarco Ottaviano of the University of Bologna and Giovanni Peri of the University of California at Davis. They say immigrants compete for jobs with broader swath of native workers, diluting their impact on the least skilled segment of the local workforce. They also say that employers can’t substitute an immigrant for an American that easily. They find that immigration’s effect on local worker’s wages is almost too small to measure.
This latest research contradicts the popular paper by Harvard University Economist Mr. Borjas, who found that immigration suppresses the wages of the least skilled workers. I tend to to agree with Mr. Ottaviano and Peri, immigrants do not hurt native workers wages, they only boost our economy.