, Columnist
Show Me the Jobs That Immigrants Steal
Allowing more immigrants into the U.S. won't destroy jobs for Americans or depress their wages.
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"Some Democrats Worry Newcomers Will Crowd Job Market," read the headline in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal. The article quotes several low-skill workers who are concerned that immigration reform and new guest-worker programs could steal their jobs and depress their wages.
This is one of those fallacies that persists in spite of centuries of evidence to the contrary. Economists even have a name for it: the lump of labor fallacy. This fallacy assumes there is a fixed amount of work in an economy, to be divided up among the pool of workers. France fell victim to it in 1998, enacting a 35-hour workweek.