Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers

Of course, a certain amount of immigration is helpful, as well as moral. I suggest reading the who article at the following link for a fuller discussion of how to mitigate the problems.

Nobody denies that the current abundance of lawyers has made it harder for them to get jobs, and depressed their wages.
Over the decades, we have seen the pattern of a shortage of engineers leading to higher salaries, leading to more people going into engineering, leading to a surplus, leading to lower salaries.
Why should we expect any difference for low wage workers?

I have personally been hurt by the fact that employers bringing in lower paid H1-B programmers have allowed them to discriminate against me because of my age.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinton-immigration-economy-unemployment-jobs-214216

The candidates tell drastically different stories about immigration. They’re both skipping half the truth.
By GEORGE J. BORJAS, Politico Magazine
September/October 2016

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Here’s the problem with the current immigration debate: Neither side is revealing the whole picture. Trump might cite my work, but he overlooks my findings that the influx of immigrants can potentially be a net good for the nation, increasing the total wealth of the population. Clinton ignores the hard truth that not everyone benefits when immigrants arrive. For many Americans, the influx of immigrants hurts their prospects significantly.

This second message might be hard for many Americans to process, but anyone who tells you that immigration doesn’t have any negative effects doesn’t understand how it really works. When the supply of workers goes up, the price that firms have to pay to hire workers goes down. Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent. Even after the economy has fully adjusted, those skill groups that received the most immigrants will still offer lower pay relative to those that received fewer immigrants.

Both low- and high-skilled natives are affected by the influx of immigrants. But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip. The monetary loss is sizable. The typical high school dropout earns about $25,000 annually. According to census data, immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent. As a result, the earnings of this particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year.

[Which is a big amount for people in this income level.]

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