Illegal Immigrants and High School Dropouts

Jacob Sullum | April 17, 2006

Writing in The New York Times, Eduardo Porter argues that "even economists striving hardest to find evidence of immigration's effect on domestic workers are finding that, at most, the surge of illegal immigrants probably had only a small impact on wages of the least-educated Americans." He notes that Harvard economists George Borjas and Lawrence Katz, who last year calculated that illegal immigration from Mexico between 1980 and 2000 reduced the wages of American high school dropouts by 8.2 percent, have produced a revised estimate of 3.6 percent that takes into account the output-boosting effects of cheap immigrant labor.