Personal Finance

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

Published

6 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.

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“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

Disability advocates sue Social Security and DOGE to stop service cuts

Published

14 hours ago

April 3, 2025

Business Finance News

A Social Security Administration (SSA) office in Washington, DC, March 26, 2025.

Saul Loeb | Afp | Getty Images

A group of disability advocates filed a federal lawsuit against the Social Security Administration and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency on Wednesday aimed at stopping cuts to the agency’s services.

Recent changes at the Social Security Administration under DOGE — including staff reductions, the elimination of certain offices and new requirements to seek in-person services — have made it more difficult for individuals with disabilities and older adults to access benefits, the lawsuit argues.

The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

The plaintiffs include the National Federation of the Blind, the American Association of People with Disabilities, Deaf Equality, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, the Massachusetts Senior Action Council and individual beneficiaries.

“The defendants’ actions are an unprecedented and unconstitutional assault on Social Security benefits, concealed beneath the hollow pretense of bureaucratic ‘reform,'” the complaint states.

In nine weeks, the new administration has “upended” the agency with “sweeping and destabilizing policy changes,” the plaintiffs claim, that have shifted agency functions to local offices while slashing telephone services.

“The result is a systematic dismantling of SSA’s core functions, leaving millions of beneficiaries without the essential benefits they are legally entitled to,” the lawsuit complaint states.

The “mass restructuring” of the agency is unlawful and violates the Rehabilitation Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, the lawsuit argues. The changes also violate multiple constitutional provisions, including the First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances, according to the plaintiffs.

With 1.1 million disability claims pending, the recent actions could also be life threatening to individuals who are dying or going bankrupt while waiting for decisions, they allege.

The Social Security Administration did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

“President Trump has made it clear he is committed to making the federal government more efficient,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston said in an email statement. “He has the authority to manage agency restructuring and workforce reductions, and the administration’s actions are fully compliant with the law.”

Lawsuit alleges reform is ‘administrative vandalism’

People hold signs during a protest against cuts made by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to the Social Security Administration, in White Plains, New York, U.S., March 22, 2025.

Nathan Layne | Reuters

The Social Security Administration sends monthly checks to around 73 million Social Security and Supplemental Security Income beneficiaries.

DOGE, which is not an official government entity, has been tasked with cutting “waste, fraud and abuse” within the federal government. President Donald Trump issued an executive order creating DOGE on Jan. 20, the same day he was inaugurated.

Since then, the Social Security Administration has cut 7,000 employee positions and closed the Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity and the Office of Transformation. The Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity handled the agency’s equal employment opportunity and civil rights programs. The Office of Transformation was responsible for coordinating customer service-related initiatives like adding the ability to use digital signatures and electronic documents.

The Social Security Administration has also changed its identity proofing policies for claiming benefits and changing direct deposit information that is expected to require more individuals to visit the agency’s offices in person.

The agency has updated its policy, allowing individuals applying for Social Security Disability Insurance, Medicare, or Supplemental Security Income who cannot use a personal my Social Security account to complete their claim entirely over the telephone, starting April 14.

The reforms amount to the dismantling of “core functions of SSA, abandoning millions of Americans to poverty and indignity,” according to the plaintiffs’ complaint.

“What the defendants frame as ‘reform’ is, in truth, administrative vandalism,” the lawsuit states.

Beneficiaries face long waits, overpayment issues

The plaintiffs include seven individuals whose experiences, including long customer service waits and, in some cases, demands to repay large sums to the Social Security Administration, are detailed in the complaint.

One plaintiff, Treva Olivero, who has been legally blind since birth, was informed in March 2024 that she had been overpaid Social Security disability insurance benefits for five or six years, prompting the agency to demand she repay more than $100,000, according to the complaint.

Olivero’s Medicaid coverage was also terminated soon after, which left her without income and health coverage. She has since been in an “ongoing struggle” to have her disability benefits reinstated, while also facing almost $80,000 in medical debt, according to the complaint.

Fiserv CEO on the nomination to Social Security Commisioner role

Another plaintiff, Merry Schoch, who received Social Security disability insurance for many years, returned to work to help pay for large medical bills after she was hit by a waste management truck in 2022. She reported her income to the Social Security Administration, and the agency made no changes to her benefit payments, according to the complaint.

Two years later, Schoch stopped working and reported her unemployment to the Social Security Administration. In August 2024, the agency then terminated her benefits and informed Schoch that she owed $30,000 for the disability benefit payments she received while working full time, according to the complaint.

Last September, Schoch was informed she could reapply for benefits. However, she has since struggled to get in touch with the agency over the phone, online and in person.

Both Olivero and Schoch are members of the National Federation of the Blind, which is also a plaintiff.

The plaintiffs want the court to reverse the Social Security Administration’s recent reforms, including staff reductions, closures of certain offices and policies requiring in-person appointments.

Personal Finance

Amid trade turmoil, ‘you do not want to time the market’

Published

17 hours ago

April 3, 2025

Business Finance News

Pres. Trump unveils sweeping tariffs: Here's what to know

As President Donald Trump rolls out sweeping new tariffs on goods imported into the United States, Americans are growing increasingly pessimistic about their financial fate.

Consumers worry that the duties will cause inflation to flare up again, while investors fear that higher prices will mean lower profits and more pain for the battered stock market.

As of Thursday morning, futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average were down 1,200 points, or 2.8%. S&P 500 futures sank 3.4%, and Nasdaq-100 futures lost 4%.

But sharp drops — or sudden spikes — in the market are to be expected, according to Jean Chatzky, CEO of HerMoney.com and host of the podcast HerMoney with Jean Chatzky.

“With these volatile markets, you do not want to time the market,” she said of the old adage. “Timing the market doesn’t work — it’s time in the market.”

Trade tensions, inflation and concerns about a possible recession have undermined consumer confidence across the board, several studies show.

Still, it’s normal for most Americans to feel unnerved during heightened volatility, Chatzky said.

“There’s very little doubt that consumers are feeling nervous, maybe more nervous than we’ve felt in quite some time,” she said.

Committing to setting money aside in a high-yield savings account, whether by scaling back on dining out or rideshare expenses, will help regain some financial control, Chatzky said.

Top-yielding online savings accounts currently pay 4.4%, on average, well beyond the savings account rates at some of the largest retail banks, which average just 0.41%.

“Taking action is the best way to feel more resilient,” she said.

It’s understandable why some may be hesitant to continue investing, however, when you are investing for the long term, a down market is an opportunity for dollar-cost averaging, which helps smooth out price fluctuations in the market, Chatzky said.

This is also a good time to check your investments to make sure you are still allocated properly and rebalance as needed, so you are not taking on more risk that you are comfortable with, she added.

Timing the market is a losing bet

Talk yourself down from making any sudden financial moves, Chatzky advised.

Trying to time the market is almost always a bad idea, other financial experts also say. That’s because it’s impossible to know when good and bad days will happen.

For example, the 10 best trading days by percentage gain for the S&P 500 over the past three decades all occurred during recessions, often in close proximity to the worst days, according to a Wells Fargo analysis published last year.

And, although stocks go up and down, the S&P 500 index has an average annualized return of around 10% over the past few decades.

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Personal Finance

How to file for a free tax extension if you can’t make April 15 deadline

Published

19 hours ago

April 3, 2025

Business Finance News

Galina Zhigalova | Moment | Getty Images

If you can’t file your taxes by the April 15 deadline, there’s a free, easy way to submit a federal tax extension online, experts say.

Nearly 1 in 3 American admit that they procrastinate when it comes filing their taxes, according to a January survey of more than 1,000 U.S. filers from IPX1031, an investment property exchange service. In addition, about 25% do not feel prepared to file their taxes, the survey found.

As of March 21, the IRS received roughly 80 million individual returns of the 140 million expected this filing season, the agency’s latest reporting shows.

Many natural disaster victims have an automatic tax extension, which varies by jurisdiction. Military members serving in a combat zone also have more time to file.

However, the federal tax deadline for the majority of taxpayers is April 15. It’s possible to push that due date to Oct. 15 by filing for an extension.

But “it’s an extension to file, not an extension to pay,” said Jo Anna Fellon, managing director at financial services firm CBIZ.

“It’s an extension to file, not an extension to pay.”

After the tax deadline, you will start incurring the failure-to-pay penalty of 0.5% of your unpaid taxes for each month or partial month that your taxes remain unpaid. The failure-to-pay penalty has a maximum charge of 25% of your unpaid taxes.

That’s cheaper than the failure-to-file penalty, which applies when you don’t submit your return by the deadline. The failure-to-file penalty is 5% of unpaid taxes monthly, also limited to 25%.

But you’ll also owe interest on your unpaid balance, which is currently 7% and accrues daily after April 15.

You can estimate your taxes owed by creating a “pro forma return” — or mock version of your filing — using as many tax forms as possible, Fellon said.

The ‘easiest way’ to file an extension

There are a few free options to file a tax extension.

For federal taxes, you can complete Form 4868 and mail it to the IRS. But it’s better to file digitally to avoid processing delays amid the agency’s shrinking workforce, experts say. Paper filing can also increase fraud risk, they say.

The “easiest way” is by choosing “extension” when making a payment for 2024, which automatically submits Form 4868, according to Tommy Lucas, a certified financial planner and enrolled agent at Moisand Fitzgerald Tamayo in Orlando, Florida.

“It takes all of five minutes,” and you can double-check the transaction via your IRS online account, he said.

IRS Direct Pay

Internal Revenue Service

Alternatively, you can file your extension for free online via IRS Free File, a public-private partnership between the IRS and several tax software companies.

For the 2025 season, you can use IRS Free File for returns if your adjusted gross income, or AGI, was $84,000 or less in 2024. But there’s no income limit to file an extension, Lucas said.