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Comment by skylan_q | Hacker News Reader

Immigration also increases the size of the labor pool, driving down wages.

It's empirically false that high rates of immigration lead to lower real wages. International comparisons show that it is actually the other way around. The "lump of labor fallacy" is still very persuasive to people who have never studied economics, but people who have traveled around the world notice examples like Hong Kong (high immigration, high wages for region) and reflect that new people in a place leads to more innovation and more demand in the local economy.

I've studied plenty of economics and have been around the world and back. Bringing in more labor increases the supply of it and there's also the added effect of immigrants willing to work for less than the local population. To deny this is to deny supply & demand and data.

I don't know that it's that cut and dry. People don't exist in a vacuum. New people show up, and they still need to eat, live, buy TVs. Some of them will probably start companies and increase the labour demand. etc etc.

I'm not an expert by any means, but it didn't take much to find an article that supports this idea:

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We find that the increased supply of non-EU low skilled immigrants pushed native workers to pursue more complex occupations. This reallocation happened mainly through movement across firms. Immigration increased mobility of natives across firms and across municipalities but it did not increase their probability of unemployment. We also observe a significant shift in the native labor force towards complex service industries in locations receiving more immigrants. Those mechanisms protected individual wages from immigrants competition and enhanced their wage outcomes. While the highly educated experienced wage gains already in the short-run, the gains of the less educated built up over time as they moved towards jobs that were complementary to those held by the non-EU immigrants.

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http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/08/29/immigration_a...

George Borjas (Professor of Economics specialized in immigration issues at Harvard) estimates it's less than 4% for a 10% immigrant-induced increase in the number of workers in a particular skill group, at the US national level.

http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/gborjas/publications/journal/J...

But the demand increases, driving up wages. Immigrants are also consuming...

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