Personal Finance

Are immigrants taking jobs from U.S. workers? Here’s what economists say

Published

3 months ago

September 28, 2024

The first debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump is shown on television at the Juventud 2000 migrant shelter in Tijuana, Mexico, on Sept. 10, 2024. Immigration has been a hot topic throughout the presidential campaign.

Carlos Moreno/NurPhoto via Getty Images

The idea that immigration has a negative impact on the U.S. job market is a common theme of former President Donald Trump’s speeches on the presidential campaign trail.

“They’re taking your jobs,” the Republican nominee told supporters on Sept. 21 in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Immigration is also a top issue for Republican voters: 82% of Trump supporters say immigration is “very important” to their vote in the 2024 presidential election, second only to the economy, according to the Pew Research Center. It’s the lowest-priority issue for Democrats, Pew found. Pew polled 9,720 U.S. adults from Aug. 26 through Sept. 2.

However, evidence suggests immigrants help the overall economy. And, at a high level, they aren’t taking jobs from or reducing the wages of U.S.-born (or so-called native) workers, according to economists who study the impact of immigration on the labor market.

“Overall, the consensus is very strong that there are not significant costs to U.S.-born workers from immigration, at least the type of immigration we have historically had in the U.S.,” said Alexander Arnon, director of business tax and economic analysis at the Penn Wharton Budget Model.

Immigrants expected to boost the economy

There are several reasons why immigrants largely benefit the economy and job market, economists said.

For one, the job market isn’t static.

Immigrants take jobs but they also create new ones by spending in local economies and by starting businesses, economists said. One 2020 research paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found immigrants are 80% more likely to become entrepreneurs than native workers.

A recent “surge” of immigrants to the U.S. is expected to add $8.9 trillion (or 3.2%) to the nation’s GDP over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan scorekeeper for Congress.

The 2024 election is going to come down to immigration and affordability, says pollster Frank Luntz

“That’s enormous,” said Michael Clemens, a professor at George Mason University and an economist whose research examines the economic causes and effects of migration. “That creates jobs, that raises pay, that is an increase in the size and complexity of the U.S. economy.”

Immigrants also aren’t perfect substitutes for U.S. citizens in many job positions; in fact, the two groups often complement each other rather than compete, economists said.

However, some economic research suggests immigration can impact the wages of certain subgroups of U.S.-born workers, especially those with lower levels of educational attainment.

Overall, the consensus is very strong that there are not significant costs to U.S.-born workers from immigration.

Alexander Arnon

director of business tax and economic analysis at the Penn Wharton Budget Model

Some economists contend an influx of immigrants can reduce wages for such Americans in the short term, though other researchers have found that Americans ultimately benefit, partly because those in direct competition with immigrants are able to find higher-paying jobs.

“Not everybody agrees about it,” Clemens said.

A big supply of new labor due to immigration can be “difficult and anxiety-inducing” for American workers who must adjust, he added.

“But people end up in better circumstances,” he said.

Immigration helped cool ‘overheated’ job market

The El Chaparral pedestrian border crossing at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in Tijuana, Mexico, on Jan. 4, 2024.

Carlos Moreno/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Immigrants accounted for about 14% of the U.S. population in 2022, according to Pew, citing most recently available federal data.

Most are in the U.S. legally: Undocumented immigrants represented 3.3% of the total U.S. population and 23% of immigrants in 2022, Pew said. Their number has increased in recent years, to 11 million, but remains below its 2007 peak of more than 12 million.

The number of immigrants coming to the U.S. has “increased sharply in recent years,” the CBO wrote in July.

Net immigration is expected to be 8.7 million people higher from 2021 to 2026 than would have been extrapolated from pre-Covid migration trends, the CBO said. (Its analysis excludes those with green cards.)

The influx has been beneficial for the pandemic-era economy, economists said.

It “helped cool an overheated labor market” over the past two years, Elior Cohen, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, wrote in May.

Demand for workers hit historic highs as the U.S. economy started to reopen in 2021. Wages rose sharply — at their fastest pace in decades — as businesses competed for workers, putting upward pressure on high inflation.

Immigrant labor alleviated “severe staffing shortages,” especially in industries like leisure and hospitality, helping dilute those inflationary wage pressures, Cohen wrote.

In this sense, immigrants weren’t competing with U.S. citizens for jobs but instead taking a surplus of available jobs, said Giovanni Peri, an economics professor and director of the Global Migration Center at the University of California, Davis.

In fact, a long-term net decline in the number of non-college-educated immigrants to the U.S. from 2010 to 2021 likely contributed to those recent labor shortages, he said.

“If there is a time when low-skilled immigration isn’t competing with natives and helping fill shortages, it’s been the last two years,” Peri said.

‘Little evidence’ of employment impact

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, economists from varying sides of the debate published a “consensus” viewpoint in 2017 on the job market effect of immigration, Clemens said.

The panel of economists found “little evidence that immigration significantly affects” overall employment levels among Americans, they wrote for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

“I’d say the consensus has gotten [even] stronger” since then, said Arnon of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, who authored a separate 2016 analysis of existing research on immigration’s economic impact.

To the extent there’s job competition from new immigrants, it tends to fall mostly on prior immigrants rather than native U.S. workers, according to the National Academies paper.

Prior immigrants are most likely to experience “negative wage effects,” it said.

However, native-born high school dropouts may experience that effect, as well, since they “share job qualifications similar to the large share of low-skilled [immigrant] workers,” the National Academies paper said.

Immigrants without a high school degree account for the largest share of foreign-born workers, followed by those with graduate or professional degrees, according to the Penn Wharton analysis.

A heated debate on low-skilled workers

A boat arrives in Key West, Florida with Cuban refugees in April 1980 from Mariel Harbor after crossing the Florida Straits.

Tim Chapman | Miami Herald | Getty Images

One influential — and controversial — paper by Harvard economist George Borjas echoes that finding about high school dropouts.

Borjas — who was among the more than three dozen economists who authored the National Academies consensus paper — studied the Mariel boatlift, a mass emigration of 125,000 Cuban refugees to South Florida from April to October 1980.

At least 60% of these “Marielitos” were high school dropouts, he said. Borjas found that the large boost in labor supply caused the wages of high school dropouts in Miami to drop “dramatically,” by 10% to 30%.

Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser during the Trump administration, cited the paper in 2017 as a justification for a new proposal to curtail legal immigration, particularly among lower-skilled workers.

Asked to comment on Trump’s campaign statements about immigration and jobs, Anna Kelly, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said in an emailed statement that the former president “has never wavered in his promise to put America First, including workers born in the USA and incentivizing companies to keep jobs at home.”

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Borjas’ finding was in contrast with earlier work by economist and Nobel laureate David Card, who had found the Mariel boatlift didn’t increase unemployment or negatively affect wages of “less-skilled” non-Cuban or Cuban workers.

Some economists, including Clemens, dispute Borjas’ findings. Borjas didn’t return a request for comment.

“Sudden surges of immigration obviously affect the ability of native workers to find and take jobs on a given afternoon,” Clemens said.

But immigrants “also create jobs,” Clemens said. “A large preponderance of evidence is the job creation effect overwhelms the competition effect, even in the short term.”

Effect may depend on the economic environment

Migrant workers pick strawberries during harvest south of San Francisco.

Joe Sohm/Visions Of America | Universal Images Group | Getty Images

Native U.S. workers and immigrants, even those with similar educational backgrounds, tend to complement each other via their skills, making each other more productive and in essence jointly creating each other’s jobs, Clemens said.

For example, in a restaurant, a native worker with better command of spoken English might be a waiter, while an immigrant might do kitchen-prep work or wash dishes, tasks that don’t require such language dexterity. On farms, native workers might be supervisors or run high-tech equipment while immigrants handpick crops, Clemens said.

Research by Peri and Alessandro Caiumi of the University of California, Davis, finds that factors like “occupational upgrading” generally lead native workers who initially compete with immigrants for jobs to earn higher wages in the future.

For example, from 2000 to 2019, such factors helped boost wages for less-educated native workers by a “significant” 1.7% to 2.6%, and there was also “no significant wage effect on college educated natives,” Peri and Caiumi wrote. Similarly, from 2019 to 2022, estimates suggest “small positive effects” on wages.

Ultimately, “what might have happened in Florida during the Mariel boatlift in the 1980s may be different than what happens in Arizona in the 2010s,” said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank.

“From a policy perspective, you have to figure out which of the studies are most relevant to the current economic environment you’re considering,” Strain said.

Personal Finance

Prices of top 25 Medicare Part D drugs have nearly doubled: AARP

Published

13 hours ago

January 9, 2025

Business Finance News

Morsa Images | Digitalvision | Getty Images

List prices for the top 25 prescription drugs covered by Medicare Part D have nearly doubled, on average, since they were first brought to market, according to a new AARP report.

Moreover, that price growth has often exceeded the rate of inflation, according to the interest group representing Americans ages 50 and over.

The analysis comes as Medicare now has the ability to negotiate prescription drug costs after the Inflation Reduction Act was signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2022.

Notably, only certain drugs are eligible for those price negotiations.

The Biden administration in August released a list of the first 10 drugs to be included, which may prompt an estimated $6 billion in net savings for Medicare in 2026.

Another list of 15 Part D drugs selected for negotiation for 2027 is set to be announced by Feb. 1 by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Biden administration releases prices of 10 drugs in Medicare negotiations

AARP studied the top 25 Part D drugs as of 2022 that are not currently subject to Medicare price negotiation. However, there is a “pretty strong likelihood” at least some of the drugs on that list may be selected in the second line of negotiation, according to Leigh Purvis, prescription drug policy principal at AARP.

Those 25 drugs have increased by an average of 98%, or nearly doubled, since they entered the market, the research found, with lifetime price increases ranging from 0% to 293%.

Price increases that took place after the drugs began selling on the market were responsible for a “substantial portion” of the current list prices, AARP found.

The top 25 treatments have been on the market for an average of 11 years, with timelines ranging from five to 28 years.

The findings highlight the importance of allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, as well as having a mechanism to discourage annual price increases, Purvis said. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, drug companies will also be penalized for price increases that exceed inflation.

Notably, a new $2,000 annual cap on out-of-pocket Part D prescription drug costs goes into effect this year. Beneficiaries will also have the option of spreading out those costs over the course of the year, rather than paying all at once. Insulin has also been capped at $35 per month for Medicare beneficiaries.

Those caps help people who were previously spending upwards of $10,000 per year on their cost sharing of Part D prescription drugs, according to Purvis.

“The fact that there’s now a limit is incredibly important for them, but then also really important for everyone,” Purvis said. “Because everyone is just one very expensive prescription away from needing that out-of-pocket cap.”

The new law also expands an extra help program for Part D beneficiaries with low incomes.

“We do hear about people having to choose between splitting their pills to make them last longer, or between groceries and filling a prescription,” said Natalie Kean, director of federal health advocacy at Justice in Aging.

“The pressure of costs and prescription drugs is real, and especially for people with low incomes, who are trying to just meet their day-to-day needs,” Kean said.

As the new changes go into effect, retirees should notice tangible differences when they’re filling their prescriptions, she said.

Personal Finance

How much money you should save for a comfortable retirement

Published

14 hours ago

January 9, 2025

Business Finance News

Rockaa | E+ | Getty Images

Many Americans are anxious and confused when it comes to saving for retirement.

One of those pain points: How much should households be setting aside to give themselves a good chance at financial security in older age?

More than half of Americans lack confidence in their ability to retire when they want and to sustain a comfortable life, according to a 2024 poll by the Bipartisan Policy Center.

It’s easy to see why people are unsure of themselves: Retirement savings is an inexact science.

“It’s really a hard question to answer,” said Philip Chao, a certified financial planner and founder of Experiential Wealth, based in Cabin John, Maryland.

“Everyone’s answer is different,” Chao said. “There is no magic number.”

Why?

Savings rates change from person to person based on factors such as income and when they started saving. It’s also inherently impossible for anyone to know when they’ll stop working, how long they’ll live, or how financial conditions may evolve — all of which impact the value of one’s nest egg and how long it must last.

That said, there are guideposts and truisms that will give many savers a good shot at getting it right, experts said.

15% is ‘probably the right place to start’

“I think a total savings rate of 15% is probably the right place to start,” said CFP David Blanchett, head of retirement research at PGIM, the asset management arm of Prudential Financial.

The percentage is a share of savers’ annual income before taxes. It includes any money workers might get from a company 401(k) match.

Those with lower earnings — say, less than $50,000 a year — can probably save less, perhaps around 10%, Blanchett said, as a rough approximation.

Conversely, higher earners — perhaps those who make more than $200,000 a year — may need to save closer to 20%, he said.

These disparities are due to the progressive nature of Social Security. Benefits generally account for a bigger chunk of lower earners’ retirement income relative to higher earners. Those with higher salaries must save more to compensate.

“If I make $5 million, I don’t really care about Social Security, because it won’t really make a dent,” Chao said.

How to think about retirement savings

Daniel De La Hoz | Moment | Getty Images

Households should have a basic idea of why they’re saving, Chao said.

Savings will help cover, at a minimum, essential expenses such as food and housing throughout retirement, which may last decades, Chao said. Hopefully there will be additional funds for spending on nonessential items such as travel.

This income generally comes from a combination of personal savings and Social Security. Between those sources, households generally need enough money each year to replace about 70% to 75% of the salaries they earned just before retirement, Chao said.

There is no magic number.

Philip Chao

CFP, founder of Experiential Wealth

Fidelity, the largest administrator of 401(k) plans, pegs that replacement rate at 55% to 80% for workers to be able to maintain their lifestyle in retirement.

Of that, about 45 percentage points would come from savings, Fidelity wrote in an October analysis.

To get there, people should save 15% a year from age 25 to 67, the firm estimates. The rate may be lower for those with a pension, it said.

The savings rate also rises for those who start later: Someone who starts saving at 35 years old would need to save 23% a year, for example, Fidelity estimates.

An example of how much to save

Retirement Planning: How to Maximize Your Financial Future

Here’s a basic example from Fidelity of how the financial calculus might work: Let’s say a 25-year-old woman earns $54,000 a year. Assuming a 1.5% raise each year, after inflation, her salary would be $100,000 by age 67.

Her savings would likely need to generate about $45,000 a year, adjusted for inflation, to maintain her lifestyle after age 67. This figure is 45% of her $100,000 income before retirement, which is Fidelity’s estimate for an adequate personal savings rate.

Since the worker currently gets a 5% dollar-for-dollar match on her 401(k) plan contributions, she’d need to save 10% of her income each year, starting with $5,400 this year — for a total of 15% toward retirement.

However, 15% won’t necessarily be an accurate guide for everyone, experts said.

“The more you make, the more you have to save,” Blanchett said. “I think that’s a really important piece, given the way Social Security benefits adjust based upon your historical earnings history.”

Keys to success: ‘Start early and save often’

Violetastoimenova | E+ | Getty Images

There are some keys to general success for retirement, experts said.

“Start early and save often,” Chao said. “That’s the main thing.” This helps build a savings habit and gives more time for investments to grow, experts said.

“If you can’t save 15%, then save 5%, save whatever you can — even 1% — so you get in the habit of knowing you need to put money away,” Blanchett said. “Start when you can, where you can.”

Every time you get a raise, save at least a portion instead of spending it all. Blanchett recommends setting aside at least a quarter of each raise. Otherwise, your savings rate will lag your more expensive lifestyle.

Many people invest too conservatively, Chao said. Investors need an adequate mix of assets such as stocks and bonds to ensure investments grow adequately over decades. Target-date funds aren’t optimal for everyone, but provide a “pretty good” asset allocation for most savers, Blanchett said.
Save for retirement in a tax-advantaged account like a 401(k) plan or an individual retirement account, rather than a taxable brokerage account, if possible. The latter will generally erode more savings due to taxes, Blanchett said.
Delaying retirement is “the silver bullet” to make your retirement savings last longer, Blanchett said. One caution: Workers can’t always count on this option being available.
Don’t forget about “vesting” rules for your 401(k) match. You may not be entitled to that money until after a few years of service.

Personal Finance

Missing quarterly tax payment could trigger ‘unexpected penalties’

Published

16 hours ago

January 9, 2025

Business Finance News

Israel Sebastian | Moment | Getty Images

The fourth-quarter estimated tax deadline for 2024 is Jan. 15, and missing a payment could trigger “unexpected penalties and fees” when filing your return, according to the IRS.

Typically, estimated taxes apply to income without withholdings, such as earnings from freelance work, a small business or investments. But you could still owe taxes for full-time or retirement income if you didn’t withhold enough.

You could also owe fourth-quarter taxes for year-end bonuses, stock dividends, capital gains from mutual fund payouts or profits from crypto sales and more, the IRS said.

Federal income taxes are “pay as you go,” meaning the IRS expects payments throughout the year as you make income, said certified public accountant Brian Long, senior tax advisor at Wealth Enhancement in Minneapolis.

If you miss the Jan. 15 deadline, you may incur an interest-based penalty based on the current interest rate and how much you should have paid. That penalty compounds daily.

Tax withholdings, estimated payments or a combination of the two, can “help avoid a surprise tax bill at tax time,” according to the IRS.

What to know about the ‘safe harbor’ rules

One way to avoid penalties is by following the “safe harbor” rule, which means “you’re meeting that [IRS] pay-as-you-go requirement,” according to Long.

To satisfy the rule, you must pay at least 90% of your 2024 tax liability or 100% of your 2023 taxes, whichever is smaller.

The threshold increases to 110% if your 2023 adjusted gross income was $150,000 or higher, which you can find on line 11 of Form 1040 from your 2023 tax return.

However, you could still owe taxes for 2024 if you make more than expected and don’t adjust your tax payments.

“The good thing about this last quarterly payment is that most individuals should have their year-end numbers finalized,” said Sheneya Wilson, a CPA and founder of Fola Financial in New York.