Grassroots Rally Team

Lower Wages and Unemployed Americans

Two persistent myths peddled by the open-borders lobby about illegal aliens are that they do not harm the wages or American workers, and even if they do, illegals in particular and immigrants in general do the jobs that Americans won’t do. Four years ago, economist George Borjas of Harvard University conducted a study for Maricopa County, Arizona. He found that illegal aliens alone depressed wages in Arizona by $1.4 billion in 2006, and knocked 4.2 percent off the wages of low-skilled workers. According the Phoenix Business Journal, Borjas calculated “that illegals make up 10 percent of all state workers and decrease all wages by 1.5 percent.”

Those findings are consistent with what Borjas reported for the Center for Immigration Studies in 2004.

Between 1980 and 2000, Borjas wrote for the CIS, immigrants reduced the average wage of American workers by four percent, or $1,700 per worker. And “among natives without a high school education, who roughly correspond to the poorest tenth of the workforce, the estimated impact was even larger, reducing their wages by 7.4 percent.”...

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