Immigrants Vs. Natives Within the Workforce

        The other day when I signed onto Vista I saw this article posted by Professor Nuno and thought it was very interesting and relevant to current immigration debate. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/24/AR2010092401774.html?nav=most_emailed
I think it is interesting when people complain about immigrants "taking" "our" jobs as it does not seem justified at all, this article does a great job of arguing that.

         Last semester I took labor economics and found a research article that discussed what the Washington Post's article addressed along with points regarding the fact that natives actually benefit from immigration. The article entitled The Economic Benefits from Immigration was written by  George J. Borjas. According to Borjas, natives mainly benefit from immigration "because of production complementarities between immigrant workers and other factors of production, and that these benefits are larger when immigrants are sufficiently "different" from the stock of native productive inputs" (1995, p.5). Borjas further explains that although benefits are relatively small, the "gains could be increased considerably if the United States pursued an immigration policy that attracted a more skilled immigrant flow" (1995, p.5). (Article is from The Journal of Economic Perspectives; Volume 9, Number 2, pp. 3-22). What Borjas means when he mentions production complementarities between immigrant workers and other factors of production is that they benefit each other and ultimately work to make the other more efficient- they do not work as substitutes- immigrant workers are not replacing native workers, but rather they are complementing them.

        Both articles made me think of the movie entitled, "A Day Without a Mexican" which is a ultimately a comedy- but  written to address very real points. It was filmed in 2004 and essentially explored the idea of what life in California would be like if all Latino workers refused to work for one day. NPR interviewed Yareli Arizmendi, an actress and co-writer of the film on May 1, 2006 as protests were being planned in effort to change the United States' policy on illegal immigrants. The article can be found at the following address; http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5372878