What immigration really does to our country

As Trump moves into his new position as president, many policies will be changed. One of those being immigration. Trump says "Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens." Trump obviously apposes immigration. Saying that it takes away our citizen's jobs and hurts are country. This may be true to some extent, as every foreigner that gets a job is one less American that gets one, but there are more nuances to this issue. So what does immigration really do to America?

The problem with thinking this way is you are generalizing every immigrant as a low-educated, low-skill worker that won't contribute much to this country, and that simply isn't true. In fact, arguably foreigners coming into America, skilled or unskilled, actually increase job opportunity and income of American workers. Studies show that immigrants do lower wages, but that is only to other immigrants. According to Current Population Survey (CPS) data from 1994–2007 as well as a study by Heidi Shierholz from 2010 titled: Immigration and Wages, we see that an increase of immigrants lowered previous immigrants wages by 4.6 percent. However, for American citizens, it actually increased wages by .6 percent. The reason for this is that when immigrants come here, they often have the same skillsets, if not better than the previous arrivals, making them easily replacable, while American citizens are seemingly untouched. 

The Huffington Post says, "A big part of the anti-immigration narrative is the perception that the majority of immigrants are poor, uneducated, and unskilled." But as stated, even for lowskilled immigrants, the effects are rarely negative, rather  positive even. However, one thing that is often over looked is the contribution that highskilled immigrants bring. 

According to a study by Stuart Anderson titled: Immigrants and billion doller startups, "Immigrants have started more than half (44 of 87) of America's startup companies valued at 1 billion dollars or more and are key members of management or product development teams in over 70 percent (62 of 87) of these companies." Of those startup companies, immigrant founders create about 760 jobs per company. Do the math and that equals to around 33,440 jobs. To put the immigrant contribution into an even better perspective, we can compare their contribution to the American economic output. Studies show that from the years 2009 to 2011, immigrants contributed 14.7 percent of the total economic output, while the overall population only contributed 13 percent. 

Of course their are still drawbacks to immigration, but facts show that the positives obviously outweigh the negatives. When looking at America on a long term basis, it's obvious that immigration is necessary to help develop the well-being of our country.