It is one of the most intuitive economic claims in politics, which is part of why it travels so well. Speaking to Turning Point USA, Vice President JD Vance made the familiar version: "a lot of those immigrants are actually undercutting the wages of American workers." [1] The intuition is that more workers must mean lower pay. Economists have spent decades measuring whether that actually happens to native-born workers, and the blanket version does not hold up.
What the consensus actually found
The most authoritative review is the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's 2017 report, which pulled together the research on immigration and the labor market. Its conclusion: measured over a period of more than ten years, the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers overall is very small. [2] It found little evidence that immigration meaningfully lowers the overall employment of native-born workers, and noted that what negative wage pressure exists falls mainly on two groups, prior immigrants and native-born workers without a high school diploma, not American workers as a whole. [2]
The newer study goes further
A 2024 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research, by Alessandro Caiumi and Giovanni Peri, did not just find a small effect. It found a positive one where the worry is loudest. Because immigrants and native workers tend to do complementary jobs rather than identical ones, immigration raised the wages of less-educated native-born workers by between 1.7 and 2.6 percent, with no significant effect on college-educated natives. [3] Complements, not substitutes: the newcomers expanded the work to be done rather than simply competing for a fixed pile of it.
Data
| Low estimate | 1.7% |
|---|---|
| High estimate | 2.6% |
Where the claim has a grain
The honest exception is narrow. Vance was speaking partly about H-1B visas, and in specific high-skill occupations there are real cases of employers using a visa program to hold down pay. That is a legitimate, targeted concern about how one program is run. It is a different statement from the sweeping one that immigrants are undercutting the wages of American workers generally, which is the claim the research contradicts.
THE BOTTOM LINE
- "Undercutting the wages of American workers": Mostly False [1]
- National Academies: the effect on native wages overall is "very small" [2]
- Peri 2024: immigration raised less-educated native wages 1.7 to 2.6 percent; complements, not substitutes [3]
The fear that another worker's gain must be your loss is old and powerful, and it is not what the labor market shows. The bodies that actually measure this, from the National Academies to peer-reviewed economists, keep landing in the same place: for American workers overall, the wage effect of immigration is somewhere between negligible and slightly positive.
