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High-skilled immigrant workers create new jobs.According to a 2012 report from the Information Technology Industry Council, the Partnership for a New American Economy, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, research has found that “every foreign-born student who graduates from a U.S. university with an advanced degree and stays to work in STEM has been shown to create on average 2.62 jobs for American workers—often because they help lead in innovation, research, and development.”A 2011 report from the Partnership for a New American Economy concluded that immigrants were founders of 18 percent of all Fortune 500 companies, many of which are high-tech giants. As of 2010, these companies generated $1.7 trillion in annual revenue, employed 3.6 million workers worldwide, and included AT&T, Verizon, Procter & Gamble, Pfizer, Comcast, Intel, Merck, DuPont, Google, Cigna, Sun Microsystems, United States Steel, Qualcomm, eBay, Nordstrom, and Yahoo!A 2007 study by researchers at Duke University and Harvard University concluded that one-quarter of all engineering and technology-related companies founded in the United States from 1995 to 2005 “had at least one immigrant key founder,” and that these companies “produced $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers in 2005.” Moreover, these immigrant-founded firms have “contributed greatly to the country’s economic growth over time.”A 2006 study by the National Venture Capital Association found that, during the previous 15 years, immigrants started one-quarter of the public companies in the United States backed by venture capital. These companies had a market capitalization of more than $500 billion and employed 220,000 workers in the United States in 2006. The largest of these immigrant-founded firms were Intel, Solectron, Sanmina-SCI, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Yahoo!, and Google.A 2001 study by researchers at Georgia State University and the University of Missouri-St Louis found that foreign-born scientists and engineers in the United States are “disproportionately represented” among individuals elected to the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering, among authors of scientific papers and patents, and among founders and chairs of biotechnology companies.High-skilled immigrants supplement rather than displace native-born workers.The 2012 report from the Information Technology Industry Council, the Partnership for a New American Economy, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce finds that many STEM occupations “have markedly low unemployment, and that foreign-born STEM workers currently in the workforce are complementing, not displacing their U.S. counterparts.”There is full employment among U.S.-citizen STEM workers with advanced degrees. The federal government defines “full employment” as an unemployment rate of no more than 4 percent (to account for people who are “unemployed” because they are in the middle of changing jobs, moving, etc.). But for U.S.-citizen STEM workers with PhDs the unemployment rate is only 3.15 percent, and for those with master’s degrees it is 3.4 percent.In some STEM occupations, the unemployment rate is even lower. Unemployment among Petroleum Engineers, for instance, is 0.1 percent, for Computer Network Architects it is 0.4 percent, and for Nuclear Engineers it is 0.5 percent.Those STEM fields in which large shares of workers are foreign-born have low unemployment rates among native-born workers. For example, just under one-quarter of Medical Scientists are foreign-born, but native-born Medical Scientists have an unemployment rate of just 3.4 percent.According to a 2011 report from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce: “High and rising wage premiums are being paid to STEM workers in spite of the increasing global supply. This suggests that the demand for these workers is not being met.”This demand is not only coming from industries that traditionally hire STEM workers, but also industries like Professional and Business Services, Healthcare Services, Advanced Manufacturing, Mining, and Utilities and Transportation. Employers in these industries are willing to pay top dollar for workers with STEM backgrounds, which has the effect of “diverting” many STEM graduates into non-traditional career paths.Native-born workers with S&E degrees aren’t being driven out of S&E occupations by immigrants; they are being lured into non-S&E occupations where their S&E skills are in high demand and command higher salaries. In other words, they face a wide range of opportunities, not a shortage of options.Native-born STEM graduates are the most likely to be “diverted” into non-traditional career paths for a variety of economic, social, and cultural reasons. And this “diversion” of native-born STEM graduates “will continue and likely accelerate in the future.” As a result, there is likely to be “an increasing reliance on foreign-born STEM talent among American employers.”High-Skilled Immigrant Workers Improve the Wages of Native-Born WorkersA 2011 study from the Institute for the Study of Labor found that earnings are higher among H-1B visa-holders than among native-born workers with at least a bachelor’s degree.Computer and Information Technology: After controlling for age differences, education, occupation, and industry effects, results show that newly arrived H-1B workers earn close to 7 percent more than U.S.-born workers of the same age, education, and specific occupation, with an additional increase of about 5 percent for those renewing their visas.Engineering: When age differences are accounted for, recent H-1B visa-holders experience a 13 percent wage advantage over native-born workers. Further, there is no statistical difference in earnings between new and renewing visa holders.Science and Mathematics: The research results show that there is no statistical difference in earnings between H-1B visa holders, naturalized citizens, and similar native-born workers.Healthcare: In this industry, H-1B visa-holders tend to earn more overall. Furthermore, the authors suggest that, when taking into account education levels, there is little or no statistical difference in wage earnings between H-1B workers and native-born workers.A 2013 study by the Brookings Institution found that H-1B visa-holders are paid more than non-H-1B workers within the same occupations among workers with similar experience. Overall, on average, H-1B workers earn higher wages than employed U.S.-born workers with bachelor’s degrees ($81,322 compared to $67,301), but are also 10 years younger and more educated.The same study found that for occupations with the most H-1B requests, wage growth in recent years has been much higher than the national average.From 2009 to 2011, there was nominal wage growth for U.S.-born workers with at least a bachelor’s degree, but that growth was relatively high for most prominent occupations with large numbers of H-1B applications. In particular, wage growth was strong in large H-1B occupational categories including computer occupations (1.3 percent growth) and engineering (2.1 percent growth).Wage growth was stronger than the national average since 2009 for every prominent H-1B occupational category except life scientists, and since 2000, all prominent H-1B categories except postsecondary teachers witnessed higher than average wage growth. Since 2000, wage growth was 2.7 percent for computer occupations, 3.0 percent for engineers, 3.4 percent for financial specialists, and 2.9 percent for mathematical science occupations.Furthermore, in the industry category with the most H-1B requests, Computer Systems Design and Related Services, wage growth has been much larger than the national average since 1990 (5.5 percent growth) and since 2009 (7.7 percent growth). This is in comparison to wage growth across all industries of 0.8 percent since 1990 and 1.6 percent since 2009.There is no direct correlation between immigration and unemployment.If immigrants really “took” jobs away from large numbers of native-born workers, especially during economic hard times, then one would expect to find high unemployment rates in those parts of the country with large numbers of immigrants—especially immigrants who have come to the United States recently and, presumably, are more willing to work for lower wages and under worse conditions than either long-term immigrants or native-born workers. Yet there is little apparent relationship between recent immigration and unemployment rates at the regional, state, or county level.An IPC analysis of 2011 data from the American Community Survey found that, at the county level, there is no statistically significant relationship between the unemployment rate and the presence of recent immigrants who arrived in 2000 or later.Foreign-born and native-born workers do not generally compete for the same jobs.Immigrants and native-born workers fill different kinds of jobs that require different skills. Even among less-educated workers, immigrants and native-born workers tend to work in different occupations and industries. If they do work in the same occupation or industry—or even the same business—they usually specialize in different tasks, with native-born workers taking higher-paid jobs that require better English-language skills than many immigrant workers possess. In other words, immigrants and native-born workers usually complement each other rather than compete.As data from the 2012 Current Population Survey illustrates, most immigrant and native-born workers are not competing with each other in today’s tight job markets.The data demonstrate—as have other, more detailed—that most foreign-born workers differ from most native-born workers in terms of what occupations they work in, where in the country they live, and how much education they have.What this means in practical terms is that most native-born workers are not directly competing for jobs with immigrant workers because they are in different labor markets. In fact, even within the same company, immigrants and natives may not be in competition with each other due to differences in occupation, education, and location.There is no correlation between immigration and minority unemployment.Cities experiencing the highest levels of immigration tend to have relatively low or average unemployment rates for African Americans. An analysis of 2010 Census data by Saint Louis University economist Jack Strauss found that cities with greater immigration from Latin America experience lower unemployment rates, lower poverty rates, and higher wages among African Americans.Latino immigrants and African Americans fill complementary roles in the labor market—they are not simply substitutes for one another. In addition, cities which have suffered the effects of declining population are rejuvenated by an inflow of Latino immigrants who increase the labor force, tax base, and consumer base.The grim job market which confronts many minority workers is the product of numerous economic and social factors: the decline of factory employment, the deindustrialization of inner cities, and racial discrimination, among others. Immigration plays a very small role. According to Yale University economist Gerald D. Jaynes, the impact on less-educated native-born workers of competition with immigrant workers “is swamped by a constellation of other factors (such as declining factory jobs and other blue-collar employment).”Manuel Pastor of the University of California, Santa Cruz, concludes that “in the policymaking process, the small size of immigration’s impact on the labor market must be kept in perspective.” There are many other, far more significant factors contributing to unemployment and low wages among African American men in particular, such as “the rising level of skill requirements of jobs, racial discrimination, and spatial mismatch between the location of employment opportunities and residential locations of blacks.”Economist Gerald D. Jaynes concludes that “the best statistical studies of the effects of immigration on the wages and employment of the native-born conclude that such effects are relatively small—and in any event secondary to other causes of low wages and unemployment.” Jaynes and a colleague “launched a large-scale statistical analysis to measure immigration’s effects on wages and employment of natives nationwide. To our surprise, no matter how we approached the data, our results showed either no effects or very modest effects for the least-educated black men.”Immigration creates new jobs.Immigrants create jobs as consumers and entrepreneurs. Immigrant workers spend their wages in U.S. businesses—buying food, clothes, appliances, cars, etc. Businesses respond to the presence of these new workers and consumers by investing in new restaurants, stores, and production facilities. And immigrants are 30 percent more likely than the native-born to start their own business. The end result is more jobs for more workers.Economist Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis, concludes that “immigrants expand the U.S. economy’s productive capacity, stimulate investment, and promote specialization that in the long run boosts productivity,” and “there is no evidence that these effects take place at the expense of jobs for workers born in the United States.”