A century of data shows that Donald Trump is wrong about the jobs impact of immigration Research by Giovanni Peri cited in Quartz
Quartz, August 15, 2016
If US presidential candidate Donald Trump wants an immigration
system that works for Americans, he might want to consider one
with far fewer restrictions than he’s proposing.
Immigrants don’t cause high unemployment. In fact, a century
of data suggests Trump has both his chronology and his causation
reversed—it shows that a thriving US job market causes
immigration to rise.
Trump was also mistaken in his assertion that higher immigration
results in lower wages for Americans. In fact, the opposite is
true, asQuartz has noted before. In a
2012 study (pdf), economic professors Gianmarco
Ottaviano of the London School of Economics and Giovanni Peri of
the University of California, Davis, found that immigration in
the US between 1990 and 2006 improved the salaries of native-born
workers on average by 0.6%. The study also looked specifically at
native-born workers with no high school degree, the slice of the
US population that is commonly thought of as being most
vulnerable to competition from immigrant labor, and found that in
their case, too, there was a small, positive impact (between 0.6%
and 1.7%) on the wages of native-born workers.
Giovanni Peri received his degree in Economics from UC Berkeley
in 1998. His research focuses on the determinants of
international migrations and their impact on labor markets,
productivity, and investments.
1140 Social Sciences & Humanities Building
Davis, CA
