Immigration and the Underclass

Abstract

The size and nature of recent immigration to the United States have raised the possibility that immigrants have diminished the labor market opportunities of low-skilled, native minority workers and, thereby, might have contributed to the emergence of the urban underclass. To the extent that immigrants and native workers are substitute factors of production, immigrants may reduce the wage rates of native labor, increase their unemployment, lower their labor force participation, undermine working conditions, and reduce rates of internal mobility. While casual empiricism would seem to support the notion that immigrants have depressed the opportunities of low-skilled native workers, careful and sophisticated analyses by a number of social scientists provide little evidence that immigrants have had any significant negative impacts on the employment situation of black Americans. Thus competition from unskilled immigrants should not be included on the list of factors that have facilitated the growth of the underclass.