Are immigrants really taking the jobs of the French (and Americans)?

The oldest argument against immigration claims it creates unfair competition for local workers. But does this claim hold up against the research on the topic?

A famous American immigrant once said: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Albert Einstein may not have approved, but immigration is one issue that is often prone to oversimplification. Everyone has heard this at least once: immigrants take our jobs and drive the wages down. If we look at the law of supply and demand, this statement is not entirely unfounded. After all, immigration increases the labour supply. If demand for labour remains stable, this can lead to lower wages or higher unemployment, as illustrated by the graph below.

This argument was popularised in France by the National Front (FN) party which, in 1978, began using the slogan: “One million unemployed means one million immigrants too many”. Oversimplifications transcend time and borders: Donald Trump’s former top adviser, Stephen Miller, recently echoed this model in 2023, asserting that “mass deportation will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers, who will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs”.

Immigration’s salary

Although this discourse was used to win votes, the belief that immigration is an economic burden is latent, even beyond our borders. In 2013, 47% of British people considered immigration to be detrimental to the national economy, a proportion that reached 65% in Wales. More recently, according to an Ifop-Fiducial survey conducted for Sud Radio in 2024, 74% of French people believe that economic immigration contributes to driving down wages.

However, it seems that the supply and demand model is far too simplistic to explain a phenomenon as complex as immigration. As the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford explains, immigration does not affect labour supply alone; it also influences demand on the part of employers. Anthony Edo points out that firms adapt their production techniques and their capital stock, offsetting the theoretically negative effects of immigration. The graph below shows that an increase in labour demand offsets the theoretically adverse effects of an expanding supply.

Are we talking about changes in jobs or wages? Which worker segmentation best describes the changes that occur? Are the skills of newly arrived workers complementary or substitutable to those of native workers? The effects of immigration are more complex than they appear.

Impact on employment

In France, the overall impact of newly arrived immigrants on employment remains small. According to France Stratégie, “a 1% increase in the labour force due to immigration would, according to the studies, result in a variation in the employment of non-immigrants of between -0.3% and +0.3%”. Studying this phenomenon in more detail, Anthony Edo and Cem Özgüzel identified three determinants:

Time: in the longer run, the adverse effects for low-skill workers are reduced and the gains for skilled workers are amplified.
Location: dynamic regions are better equipped to absorb an influx of new immigrant workers.
Worker segmentation: on average, immigration has a slightly positive effect on the employment rate of skilled workers, and a slightly negative one on that of low-skill workers.

This matrix thus provides a more comprehensive conceptual framework for analysing the impact of immigration on employment, taking into account:

the time frame: are we examining the effects of immigration immediately after the influx of new immigrant workers, or over a longer period (between 5 and 10 years)?
the level of qualification: by segmenting the population into low-skill and skilled workers.

Impact on wages

The impact of immigration on wages is difficult to determine precisely. Researchers reach different conclusions depending on their methodological choices and the context of their studies, hence the lack of consensus. Although the overall effects of immigration on wages are relatively small, a segmented analysis of skilled and low-skill workers provides a more detailed picture of the impacts on these different categories.

Low-skill natives

Some studies, particularly those using a spatial approach, show that immigration has a slightly negative impact on the wages of low-skill natives in the United States (-1.2%). In contrast, other studies using a structural approach reveal a slightly positive effect in France (+0.4%). These differences are not so much due to geography; they are due to the methods used. The second study takes into account elements such as complementarity between workers and temporal adjustments.

Complementarity phenomenon

Contrary to popular belief, the arrival of low-skill workers can be beneficial for native workers in similar jobs, provided that their skills are complementary. In the United States (US), for example, low-skill immigrants often take up manual jobs where the skills required are more easily transferable from one country to another. This leads native workers to redirect their efforts to non-manual jobs, which are often less strenuous and less accessible to immigrants.

A similar phenomenon can be observed in France. While the French are increasingly reluctant to work in occupations perceived as arduous, immigrants are over-represented in key occupations where there are labour shortages. In the Île-de-France region, for example, data from 2018 shows that 61.4% of domestic and homecare workers, as well as 60.8% of unskilled workers in structural construction work, public works, concrete and extraction, are immigrant workers.

Temporal adjustments

A study published in 2008 highlights that immigration has negative effects on wages in the US (-0.7%) in the short run, but positive effects in the long run (+0.3%). These results illustrate the gradual adjustment of firms, which adapt their demand for labour to integrate these newly arrived workers (see graph above). These structural adjustments show that the impacts of immigration on wages are not static and depend on time dynamics.

Skilled natives

Skilled immigration is less controversial, although some debates on immigration law in France have explicitly targeted the residence permits granted to foreign students. Some studies point to a slightly negative impact, while others highlight positive effects due to productivity gains and advances in innovation. As Gianluca Orefice, Professor of Economics at Paris Dauphine University, points out, these mixed results can once again be explained by complementarity and adjustment mechanisms in the labour market. Skilled migrants tend to work in highly technical jobs (engineers, software developers), while skilled natives tend more towards positions requiring communication skills (finance, administrators). This distribution of roles reduces direct competition and promotes a degree of synergy between the two groups.

Immigrant entrepreneurs

The statement “immigration = unemployment” does not hold water, as it only considers immigrants as new labour. Yet, immigrants contribute to wealth creation in other ways, such as entrepreneurship and consumption. According to an OECD study in Europe in 2007 and 2008, immigrant entrepreneurs employed 750 000 people in Germany, 500 000 in the United Kingdom (UK), and 400 000 in France. In some European countries, such as the UK, Hungary and the Czech Republic, a self-employed immigrant creates more jobs on average than a self-employed native.

The findings of the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP, 2022) are consistent with this. More than one in two unicorns – unlisted companies valued at over US$1 billion – were founded or co-founded by immigrants in the US. Yet immigrants make up only 15% of the country’s population. According to the same study, these unicorns each created an average of 859 jobs. The graph below shows a dramatic increase in the number of jobs created between 2018 and 2022 by immigrant-founded US unicorns.

Immigration and employers

“It is employers who are driving the demand for immigration in France,” asserted Philippe Guibert, former director of France’s Government Information Service (SIG), on CNews. This statement from September 2024 did not come out of nowhere: it reflects a widespread view that employers are closely linked to immigration. Those who subscribe to this oversimplification believe that multinationals and international finance encourage immigration in order to reduce labour costs, as immigrants are said to accept lower wages.

It is undeniable that in the past, following major crises, immigration has been directly orchestrated by industrialists in collaboration with the state. After the First World War, measures had to be taken to repair France’s demography, as millions had been killed, wounded or made sterile by the war. In 1924, employers’ organisations set up the Société Générale d’Immigration to remedy the labour shortage. By 1930, immigrants made up 15% of the working class. This pattern was repeated after the Second World War, to meet the needs of the automobile and construction industries, among others.

Employers’ support for immigration in the 1920s and after 1945 was not motivated by circumstance alone. In a context where firms faced limited mobility, it was in the best interest of the least competitive among them to promote an open immigration policy. By increasing the availability of labour, increased immigration helps to reduce production costs and gain market share.

Does this mean that the immigration of low-skill workers can be considered as “the reserve weapon of employers”? Not really. Why bring in immigrant workers when production can be offshored to countries with cheaper labour? In fact, for large offshorable industries, an influx of immigrant workers can even become a disadvantage, as it represents a potential loss of labour. Thus, industrial firms do not lobby for immigration per se, they lobby for economic liberalism.

The conceptual framework that systematically links immigration to employers is therefore limited or even anachronistic, as it does not take into account all contextual elements, such as the potential mobility of firms.

	Firms with low productivity and low capital intensity	Productive firms with high capital intensity
Firms unable to move	Pro low-skill immigration	Indifferent
Firms able to move	Indifferent	Indifferent or anti low-skill immigration

Table by Margaret E. Peters, Yale University.

A study of US corporate lobbying on increased low-skill immigration confirms this. In line with the classic model of gains from immigration, immobile firms with deep roots in the domestic landscape lobby for more open immigration policies. Between 1998 and 2011, 14% of issues lobbied on by immobile American firms were related to immigration. On the other hand, more mobile firms are more indifferent: on average, they lobby half as much as immobile firms (7%). The graph below also shows the low proportion of pro-immigration lobbying in relation to the total number of lobbyists.

A shift in the position of employers can be noted over time as a result of globalisation. A wide range of industries, from retail to hospitality, as well as the sugar and tobacco industries, are no longer lobbying for low-skilled immigration. And yet, during the 20th century, they were the top employers of immigrant workers. Using this model helps to highlight the contradictions in sovereignist and nationalist claims. In the future, the growing desire to become “master of one’s domain” once again through reshoring will inevitably lead to new labour needs, and therefore to immigration.