In recent years, immigration control has become a hotly-debated topic. The government is putting more emphasis on immigration control and border patrol. The past presidential election debated about immigration more than any other election in history. So why has this issue grown in popularity? Is it because of terrorists? Our current president claims that other countries are bringing their criminals here, but is that what the public is worried about? For years, strain on the economy has been blamed on the immigrants: shortages of jobs, lowered wages, and supposed mooching off the government. Knowing whether immigration really cause that much damage to the economy will guide policy-makers into placing laws that will benefit the economy. It is …show more content…
The supply of low skill immigrant workers causes firms to change their method of productivity. Natives also change their skills accordingly and pursue skills different from that of immigrants. The type of job this is best shown is manual and nonmanual labor. Noncollege educated immigrants aim for more manual labor, so natives shifted toward nonmanual tasks. This shift would decrease the chance of wages lowering.
Apart from nonskilled immigrant workers, occupations in the STEM field (science, technology, engineering, and math) have a great amount of highly educated foreign born workers. This demographic may have led to a 5% increase in college level job wages.
Many have argued that adding more workers can lead to wage stagnation, if following the rules of supply and demand. This fallacy is an assumption made on thinking that capital is fixed, capital being the output made by workers and is responsible for one-third of GDP. By this logic, immigrants decrease productivity and work output since a new immigrant worker would have to share the same equipment that would increase output with other natives and no new equipment can be added. Capital stock is not fixed. When immigrants arrive, employers purchase more capital since it will make their workers, immigrant or native, more productive. With the newly purchase capital, the economic returns made by the immigrant outweigh the cost of the capital. Therefore, increase in productivity would not lower the