Back in the early 1900s many people said immigrants were causing unemployment by "taking our jobs." In 1924 Congress passed legislation that basically restricted immigration to people from northern Europe. By 1929, when the law took full effect, immigration had slowed to a trickle. And then...

The fact is that there's no simple, direct correlation between immigration and unemployment rates. If you deported 4 million immigrants, you wouldn't provide 4 million jobs to the native born; you'd probably reduce the number of available jobs. Those 4 million immigrant workers and their families are consumers whose purchases create employment. In fact, immigrant workers spend most of their income on things like food, clothing and shelter whose production is labor-intensive. As a result, they generally produce more jobs than richer people, who tend to spend their money on luxury items and speculative investments that only provide employment for a few stockbrokers and Ponzi schemers.

You get fallacious thinking of the "they take our jobs" type because our media and our schools promote mystification about how the economy works. If people knew a little about economics and used their common sense, they never would have accepted the neoliberal economic policies of the past thirty years. Working people would have laughed off the pundits and politicians babbling about "supply side economics," the "trickle-down effect," the "self-regulating market" and the supposed benefits of outsourcing--and we wouldn't be where we are today.

David L. Wilson
Co-author, The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers