The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World Book 70)

by Robert J. Gordon

Many low-skilled immigrants disproportionately take jobs and enter occupations already staffed by foreign-born workers—for example, restaurant workers and landscape services—and thus their main effect is to drive down wages of foreign-born workers, not domestic workers. The previous literature has noted the fact that among high school dropouts, wages of domestic and foreign-born workers were almost identical up to 1980, but by 2004, foreign-born workers earned 15–20 percent less.