National Academies’ Study Shows $500 Billion Immigration Tax on Working Americans

Immigration shifts roughly $500 billion in wages away from Americans and from established immigrants, directing that money toward new immigrants and to major employers, according to a dramatic report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

On page 128, the report plays up the benefits of immigration by saying the inflow of skilled and unskilled immigrants has ”generated an immigration surplus of $54.2 billion, representing a 0.31 percent overall increase in income that accrues to the native population.”

But that flood of low-wage immigrants also cuts marketplace wages for Americans by 5.2 cents on the dollar, admits the report, titled “The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration.”...

The pro-immigration report doesn’t provide a total dollar figure for the immigration tax of 5.2 percent, even though it supplies the dollar figure for the “immigration surplus.”

But the report notes that native-born Americans provide 83.5 percent of labor in the $17.5 trillion dollar economy. Two-thirds of the economy — 65 percent — is labor, so the value of the 5.2 percent wage cut on Americans adds up to roughly $494 billion per year.

That $495 billion immigration wage-cut is eight times the NAS’ estimate of the so-called “immigration surplus,” or economic benefit created by immigration...