This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2010, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

American-born men and women with limited education face the greatest competition for jobs from undocumented workers.

That much is clear.

What's not? Whether this competition actually ends up taking jobs away from native-born people with high school degrees or less, and the degree to which immigrants drive down the value of their wages.

Those issues have divided scholars into two broad camps.

On one side, there are people such as George Borjas, a professor of economics and social policy at Harvard, and Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., who see a direct correlation between an influx of immigrants and negative consequences for Americans with lower skill levels.

But there are also learned academicians such as David Card from the University of California, Berkeley, and Giovanni Peri, a University of California, Davis, professor, who believe immigration unquestionably benefits the economy in the long term, even if working-class people take a small hit during tough economic times.

Pam Perlich, a senior research economist in the University of Utah's Bureau of Economic and Business Research, puts more credence in the latter perspective.

"Everyone agrees there has been negative compression on wages. The debate is about the extent of the compression," Perlich said, noting that in this intellectual debate, the estimates of impact range between 3 percent and 9 percent during down times. "Those are not large numbers."

In prosperous periods, she added, if immigrant labor wasn't available, "We would have had bottlenecks in labor markets and would not have been able to complete many construction projects and staff many operations."

But in times of job constriction, Perlich said, "immigrants become an easy scapegoat" for the economic woes of people left adrift in the collapses of the housing bubble and the financial system.

Her thinking is in line with Peri, whose report on The Effect of Immigrants on U.S. Employment and Productivity was published this fall by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

In this and other reports, Peri argues that the economy routinely makes adjustments as employers reorganize their production to take advantage of lower-cost immigrant labor, and all workers — both natives and immigrants — move toward occupations that fit their skills.

"When the economy is growing, new immigration creates jobs in sufficient numbers to leave native employment unharmed, even in the relatively short run and even for less-educated native workers," Peri said.

These native-born workers are pushed into "more communication-intensive tasks," usually higher-paying jobs, leaving unskilled work to immigrants.

"They're willing to work for less money, do dangerous jobs or icky work. You always need someone to clean the toilets, lay the asphalt and work in the slaughterhouses," Perlich agreed. "Those jobs traditionally are filled by immigrants. As the native-born increase their position with educational attainment, they're not willing to take the jobs of their grandparents because they've moved up."

Peri concluded that in seven to 10 years, because their labor is "somewhat differentiated and complementary to native labors … immigrants do not reduce native employment rates, but they do increase productivity and, hence, average incomes."

Harvard's Borjas, however, sees more conflict than compatibility in the job competition between natives and immigrants.

In a 2004 report, he contended that "when immigration increases the supply of workers in a skills category, the earnings of native-born workers in the same category fall. The negative effect will occur regardless of whether the immigrant workers are legal or illegal, temporary or permanent."

Borjas determined the average annual earnings of native-born men declined by 4 percent between 1980 and 2000.

"Among natives without a high school education," he said, "the estimated impact was even larger, reducing their wages by 7.4 percent."

While competition was fiercest among native-born workers without high school degrees, Borjas said it also affected people who had high school degrees and even some just out of college. Even harder hit are blacks and Latinos because "a much larger share of minorities are in direct competition with immigrants."

He did note, however, that stiff competition among laborers does have benefits for highly skilled natives.

"They pay less for the services that laborers provided," Borjas said, "and natives who hire these laborers can now specialize in producing the goods and services that better suit their skills."

Borjas' findings underscored testimony by Camarota to a House subcommittee in September.

His Center for Immigration Studies describes itself as nonpartisan but is widely viewed as an advocacy group that believes "high levels of immigration are making it harder to achieve such important national objectives as better public schools, a cleaner environment, homeland security and a living wage for every native-born and immigrant worker."

Camarota said American workers lost $375 billion in wages because of immigrant competition.

"If you are a nanny, maid, busboy, cook, meatpacker or construction laborer, the negative wage impact is likely to be large because immigration has increased the supply of workers in these sectors quite a bit."

mikeg@sltrib.com http://bit.ly/hwvOtt (infact pdf)

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About the series

In coming months, Utah lawmakers intent on immigration reform will argue their case based sometimes on facts and sometimes on assumptions. In a series that continues through Monday, The Tribune examines whether common claims made about undocumented workers match reality.

Coming Friday • Do illegal immigrants claim state and federal assistance that diminishes resources available to legal residents?

Online • Read previous stories at http://www.sltrib.com.