Trump was also mistaken in his assertion that higher immigration results in lower wages for Americans. In fact, the opposite is true, as Quartz has noted before. In a 2012 study (pdf), economic professors Gianmarco Ottaviano of the London School of Economics and Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis, found that immigration in the US between 1990 and 2006 improved the salaries of native-born workers on average by 0.6%. The study also looked specifically at native-born workers with no high school degree, the slice of the US population that is commonly thought of as being most vulnerable to competition from immigrant labor, and found that in their case, too, there was a small, positive impact (between 0.6% and 1.7%) on the wages of native-born workers.
How does this happen? As Michael Greenstone at the University of Chicago, and Adam Looney, the deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis at the US Treasury, have argued in their work at the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project , immigrants tend to complement the skills of native-born workers, and create new jobs instead of competing for the same, finite set of jobs. For instance, immigrants with fewer skills working in industries such as agriculture or construction help grow US enterprises and farms by increasing production and consuming goods and services themselves. In doing so, they increase the responsibilities and salaries of native-born workers with higher skills, and create more jobs for them.
Trump made one other serious error in his interpretation of the data. The “record” level of immigration he refers to is nothing of the sort—not when you measure it properly, as a percentage of the population, rather than basing it on absolute numbers.
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