Does Immigration Hurt US Workers?

See Immigration doesn’t hurt native-born workers by Daniel Griswold of Cato. Excerpts:

"America’s current unemployment rate of nearly 9 percent has nothing to do with immigration. The rate was below 5 percent four years ago when, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, there were 1 million more illegal immigrants in the United States than today."

"In fact, immigration helps to soften swings in the unemployment rate by acting as a kind of safety valve for the U.S. labor market. When jobs are plentiful and labor markets tight, immigrants tend to come in greater numbers. When jobs are scarce and unemployment high, immigrants arrive in fewer numbers and more choose to return to their native countries, an option not open to native-born Americans."

"Numerous studies have found a generally positive impact of immigration on native-born wages. The only two groups that do suffer some wage losses because of immigration are other recent immigrants, and the small and shrinking pool of native-born adult Americans laboring without a high school diploma.

A comprehensive study by the National Research Council in 1997 concluded that immigration boosts the income of American workers overall by as much as $10 billion, but that it does slightly reduce the wages of the lowest skilled Americans. The NRC found that immigration had no negative effect on the wages of black Americans as a group.

More recent studies have confirmed the benign impact of immigration on U.S. wages. In a 2006 study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists Gianmarco Ottaviano and Giovanni Peri estimated that immigration from 1990 to 2004 had reduced the wages of Americans without a high school diploma by 1 to 2 percent, while boosting the wages of the more than 90 percent of American adults with a high-school education by 0.7 percent in the short run and 1.8 percent in the long run."

Why don't immigrants hurt US workers more? "...they bring a different set of skills and differing preferences for the kind of work they perform compared to native-born workers...by increasing the size the labor force, immigrants tend to boost the returns to capital...the number of immigrants and their output continue to be modest compared to the overall size of a U.S. economy..."