Among those who oppose not just illegal immigration, but who also favor reducing current levels of legal immigration, one of their basic arguments is that immigrants -- whether they’re legal or illegal -- take jobs away from American-born workers. Unfortunately, as Kiplinger.com reports, new research using Census data shows that assumption to be largely false:

the Pew Hispanic Center finds little or no relationship between employment prospects for American-born workers and an increase in immigrant workers. Rakesh Kochhar, the study’s author, studies census employment data spanning both boom and bust years between 1990 and 2004. “No consistent pattern emerges to show that native-born workers suffered or benefited from increased numbers of foreign-born workers,” he writes.

As an example, Kochhar points out that while eight states with above-average growth in foreign-born workers saw a negative impact on employment rates for native-born workers, 14 states that experienced surges in immigrant workers had better-than-average employment rates for workers born in the U.S. . . .

When ranked by the growth in the foreign-born population between 1990 and 2000, the top 10 states showed significant variation in employment outcomes for native-born workers in 2000. Native workers in five of those states had employment outcomes that were better than average and native workers in the other five states had employment outcomes that were worse than average. The pattern also held for the 2000 to 2004 time period.

In other words, the results of the study basically conclude that on a national level, immigrants do not have any consistent effect on the employment prospects of American workers -- in some states they might have a negative effect but in others, they have a positive effect, and in others they have no effect at all.

Admittedly, the article does not study whether immigrants lower the wages of American-born workers, and the article does note this point. In fact, other research has generally shown that, while confirming that immigrants don’t take away jobs from American workers, they may lower the wages in certain low-paying service sector jobs.

The bottom line is, people who want to reduce current immigration levels are more than free to believe what they want to believe. But the bulk of the research just does not support their claim that immigrants take away jobs from American-born workers because on the national level, that is simply not true.