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Undocumented immigrants, the conventional wisdom goes, usually come to America for work and are willing to take pretty much any job they can find—and a new study from Harvard pretty much backs that up.
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The study, authored by professor and economist George Borjas, found that men working in the US without papers are more likely to have a job than those who were born here.
After crunching some Census data, Borjas found that 86.6 percent of undocumented immigrant men in the United States were working or looking for work between 2012 and 2013, compared to 73.9 percent of native-born men and 81.5 legal immigrant men. (Undocumented women were less likely to work.)
According to Quartz, another takeaway from the study is that the labor supply of undocumented men doesn’t respond to wage changes as dramatically as the other groups—meaning they tend to be willing to work for less, and for jobs that others don’t want, which seems to back up the much-disputed pro-immigration argument that migrants will do work that other people simply won’t do. But Quartz also noted that Borjas’s past work has found that those migrants drive down wages for unskilled labor, which could hurt some American workers.
