  This paper critically reviews the research on the impact of immigration on
employment and wages of natives in wealthy countries--where "natives" includes
previous immigrants and their descendants. While written for a non-technical
audience, the paper engages with technical issues and probes one particularly
intense scholarly debate in an appendix. While the available evidence is not
definitive, it paints a consistent picture. Industrial economies can generally
absorb migrants quickly, in part because capital is mobile and flexible, in
part because immigrants are consumers as well as producers. Thus, long-term
average impacts are probably zero at worst. And the long-term may come quickly,
especially if migration inflows are predictable to investors. Possibly, skilled
immigration boosts productivity and wages for many others. Around the averages,
there are distributional effects. Among low-income "native" workers, the ones
who stand to lose the most are those who most closely resemble new arrivals, in
being immigrants themselves, being low-skill, being less assimilated, and,
potentially, undocumented. But native workers and earlier immigrants tend to
benefit from the arrival of workers different from them, who complement more
than compete with them in production. Thus skilled immigration can offset the
effects of low-skill immigration on natives and earlier immigrants.
