The Economic Benefits from Immigration

Natives benefit from immigration mainly because of production complementarities between immigrant workers and other factors of production, and these benefits are larger when immigrants are sufficiently `different' from the stock of native productive inputs. The available evidence suggests that the economic benefits from immigration for the United States are small, on the order of $6 billion and almost certainly less than $20 billion annually. These gains, however, could be increased considerably if the United States pursued an immigration policy which attracted a more skilled immigrant flow.