Immigrants increase competition for work

The argument

Proponents of this view argue that an influx of laborers creates lower wages and a lack of jobs. The mechanism they point to is ordinary supply and demand applied to labour: increased competition suppresses wages, and migrant workers are frequently willing to work for less than native workers, so the going rate falls for everyone doing that work rather than only for the newcomers. They also draw attention to who makes the opposing case. Employers frequently make pro-immigration arguments rather than employees, and large corporations benefit from the dip in wages that an influx of workers into their sector provides. On this reading the division of opinion tracks the division of interest, which is offered as a reason to treat the economic consensus with suspicion. Immigrants, proponents contend, make the majority of native people poorer by forcing them to compete for fewer jobs — and in a world where many jobs are becoming automated, the argument runs, we cannot afford to increase the competition, because the number of positions being competed for is already shrinking. The harm is held to fall unevenly. Low-income earners, who worked largely unskilled jobs, are particularly vulnerable to competition, since theirs is the work most easily substituted. People who already need a helping hand, such as high school dropouts and those who work in the services industry, are abandoned in favor of economic migrants. Proponents say there is hard evidence in the US that wages for low-skilled jobs have gone down. Halting immigration would therefore protect the interest of local workers. On this argument, immigrants suppress wages, take jobs from native-born workers, and lower the quality of life of the already vulnerable.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The belief that immigration undercuts wages is a misunderstanding of economics. People create jobs as well as fill them; there are not a set number of jobs which, when filled, will disappear. Foreign workers who move abroad often create businesses and stimulate the economy. Immigrants do not tend to move to countries with unemployment; instead, they look for gaps in the labor market, such as the US agricultural sector. When an economy declines, economic migrants tend to leave. Some economists argue immigrants make most workers better off because they take on jobs natives do not want to do. By providing a steady supply of labor for agriculture and other low-skills jobs, they often help businesses and stimulate the economy. Many sectors, such as the restaurant industry, would be crippled by a shortage of immigrant labor. Immigration does not hurt wages for most sectors. Immigrants provide an economic stimulus and often create news businesses.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Surplus labor acts as an economic stimulus.