Immigration has tended to lower wages in both Canada and the United States…In Canada, immigration has dampened the trend to higher earnings inequality but in the United States, it has exacerbated it. A key finding of this study is that there was a sizable, statistically significant, and roughly comparable inverse relationship between immigrant-induced shifts in labour supply and wages in each of the three countries.
The reason for the different income inequality consequence is that Canada’s immigration policy makes it comparatively easier for skilled workers to arrive and compete. As CanWest News Service puts it
In the U.S., however, immigrant labour is concentrated among low-skilled workers depressing their wages, and less so of highly-skilled workers, which served to magnify growth in US wage inequality, the report said. In 2001, about four in 10 individuals with more than an undergraduate university degree were immigrants in Canada compared to only two in 10 in the U.S., it noted.
(Immigration depresses wages in Canada, U.S.: report Ottawa Citizen Eric Beauchesne Saturday May 26 2007.) Furthermore
The report also noted that significant illegal immigration to the U.S., especially from Mexico, and the fact that U.S. immigrants tend to be younger than Canadian immigrants, has also contributed to U.S. immigrant workers being lower-skilled than those who entered Canada
Three thoughts occur:
” How strange that the Congressional Democrats should generally so enthusiastic about a policy which so worsens the relative position of the lower skilled worker - as VDARE.com’s Randall Burns frequently laments.
” When was the similar official U.S Government study on this issue?
” At this writing, more than 30 hours after the publication of the report, Google News has found not one U.S. MSM story on the report. (Honorable arguable exception: David Frum, a Canadian, briefly referred to it in his NRO slot.)
Just like with the Oklahoma legislation, some immigration stories are apparently too relevant to disclose to the American Peasantry!
Update: George Borjas was involved in the study. He has discussed it on his blog, and provided a link to it [PDF]. Notable quote (P42):
immigration lowered the wage of high school dropouts by 7.1 percent, the wage of workers in the middle of the education distribution by about 2.5 percent, and the wage of workers with at least a college education by nearly 4 percent.
