In Europe, immigrants are blamed for rising crime and for stealing jobs which would otherwise go to native workers. So it is to America that defenders of immigration turn for ammunition. There, opposition to immigration is more muted. Immigration is widely perceived to bring many benefits, and not just in the form of people willing to do the dirtiest jobs that natives no longer want to do. They also come in the form of entrepreneurialism and innovation: imagine Silicon Valley without immigrants. Certainly, immigration entails some costs, the perceived view goes. Immigrants take some jobs that locals could otherwise have had. Yet on balance, the effect is positive, if not always easily measurable. At first blush, the new findings of two professors at Columbia University, Donald Davis and David Weinstein, appear to challenge this view. Their analysis, which relates uniquely to America, claims that immigration into the United States costs native workers around $72 billion a year, equivalent to nearly 1% of GDP. That is a much bigger figure than economists previously reckoned. As it happens, it is about the same scale of losses which America makes from pursuing protectionist trade policies.
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