Giovanni Peri, a researcher at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank, recently published a study showing that immigrants, rather than taking jobs from American workers, “expand the U.S. economy’s productive capacity, stimulate investment, and promote specialization that in the long run boosts productivity”.  The San Francisco Business Times first reported on the release of this study on Monday, August 30th.

This study is significant for several reasons.  First of all, opponents of any sort of immigration reform would be hard-pressed to criticize a source as fair-minded and non-biased as the Federal Reserve, which is hardly known for left-wing bias (or any bias, for that matter).  The study was based on a comparison of data from states with a high percentage of immigrant workers and states with a low percentage of immigrant workers.  Looking at the immigration debate from a purely economic standpoint and leaving behind politics, we can see that, whether they are highly skilled workers from Western Europe and East Asia or laborers from Central American and the Caribbean, immigrants fill gaps in the economy that American workers cannot fill.  The issue of bringing more highly skilled engineers and computer scientists to Silicon Valley from abroad has long been a hot topic.  And farm owners from Watsonville to the Yakima Valley to Yuma know that their fields would lie fallow if not for the cheap and ready labor of immigrant workers (whether legal or illegal).  In this still-recovering economy, let’s not use as a punching bag the workers who are increasing our productive capacity.

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