Immigration and Unemployment: Disconnect revealed along geographic, ethnic and racial lines

Washington, DC - Researchers in the United States have examined data from the national Census Bureau and found that there is no apparent relationship between the number of recent immigrants in a particular locale and the unemployment rate among native-born whites, blacks, Latinos, or Asians. Even now, at a time of economic recession and high unemployment, there is no correlation between the number of recent immigrant workers in a given state, county, or city and the unemployment rate among native-born workers. The research has been published by the Immigration Policy Center (IPC) in a report, ‘Untying the Knot’, which seeks to debunk the frequently misrepresented relationship between immigration and unemployment.

“We commissioned this report in order to take a serious look at whether or not immigration is in fact impacting unemployment among the native-born and what we have found is that scary rhetoric is no substitute for good data. These findings are in line with other long-term studies conducted around the world which have shown that immigration has very little impact on native unemployment,” said Ben Johnson, Executive Director of the American Immigration Law Foundation. “In order to have a serious policy debate we need good, honest numbers and that is what we believe we have provided in these reports.”

Dan Siciliano, Senior Research Fellow at the Immigration Policy Center and Executive Director of the Program in Law, Economics, and Business at Stanford Law School, also discussed the exploitation of U.S. unemployment levels to promote a political agenda: “The level of unemployment in the U.S. is painful, scary and difficult - so we shouldn’t belittle it. However, the very notion that immigration has anything to do with unemployment does just that. It belittles the challenge of unemployment,” said Siciliano.

Rob Paral, also a Senior Research Fellow at the Immigration Policy Center and principle of Rob Paral and Associates, further pointed out that, “on the question of race we find that there’s just no connection between immigration and unemployment. The culprit when it comes to unemployment is not immigration.”

Access the reports here: Part 1 - Part 2