NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

The Economic Benefits from Immigration

George J. Borjas

NBER Working Paper No. 4955*
Issued in December 1994
NBER Program(s):   LS

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.

*Published: Borjas, George J. "The Economic Benefits From Immigration," Journal of Economic Perspectives, 1995, v9(2), 3-22.

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