The Danger From Low-Skilled Immigrants: Not Having Them<br />In the states that received many such immigrants, less-educated American-born workers tended to shift out of lower-skilled jobs — like, say, fast-food cooks —<br />and into work requiring more communications skills, like customer-service representatives.<br />A critical insight of the new research into the impact of immigration is<br />that employers are not the only ones to adapt to the arrival of cheap foreign workers by, say, investing in a new restaurant or a new strawberry-packing plant.<br />“Immigrants who are relatively concentrated in less interactive<br />and more manual jobs free up natives to specialize in what they are relatively good at, which are communication-intensive jobs.”<br />Looking at data from 1940 through 2010, Jennifer Hunt, a professor of economics at Rutgers, concluded<br />that raising the share of less-skilled immigrants in the population by one percentage point increases the high school completion rate of Americans by 0.8 percentage point, on average, and even more for minorities.<br />Interestingly, the most vulnerable groups of American-born workers — men, the young, high school dropouts<br />and African-Americans — experienced a greater shift than other groups.<br />The millions of immigrants of little skill who swept into the work force in the 25 years up to the onset of the Great Recession — the men washing<br />dishes in the back of the restaurant, the women emptying the trash bins in office buildings — have largely improved the lives of Americans.<br />Immigrants take up a disproportionate share of many lower-skill occupations — such as<br />farm or janitorial work — as well as some higher-skill ones, like computer science.
