By Eric Jaffe
CityLab
For a country of immigrants, the U.S. can really lack compassion in its discussion of immigration. The latest example of paranoia takes the form of Donald Trump’s ugly portrayal of new arrivals as criminals—a sorry attempt by the political entrant to comb one over on the voting public, and a slap in the face to the very people building his buildings. Toward the far more comfortable end of the sanity spectrum, there are legitimate fears of companies exploiting loopholes in the H-1B immigration program to displace native workers with cheaper labor.
But even people with very reasonable concerns over working-class American livelihoods should feel comforted by a recurring trend that appears wherever and whenever people study immigration: as metro areas become more diverse, everyone becomes a lot better off.
Take a new discussion paper by researchers Thomas Kemeny of the University of Southampton, in the U.K., and Abigail Cooke of SUNY-Buffalo. Their analysis of Census labor data from 1991 to 2008 tracked changes in wages alongside those of diversity at both the city and individual workplace levels. What they found is that more immigrant workers made everyone richer: as diversity rose one standard deviation in a workplace, wages rose 1.6 percent; a similar rise in the city as a whole increased wages nearly 6 percent.
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