First, because immigrants increase the number of workers, there is additional competition in the labor market and the wage of native workers falls. Second, at the same time, native-owned firms gain because they can now hire workers at lower wages, and many native consumers gain because the lower labor costs eventually lead to cheaper goods and services. It turns out, however, that the gains accruing to the persons who use or consume immigrant services exceed the losses suffered by native-born workers, and hence society as a whole is better off.

Immigrants buy goods and services, and native-owned firms and native-born workers profit by providing these to new consumers. Immigration may also increase the productivity of some native workers.

Immigrant families tend to have more children than native families, and the schooling provided to immigrant children–such as bilingual education–is often more expensive than the schooling provided to natives.

by 1998, over 10 percent of immigrant households received cash benefits, as compared to 7 percent of native households.

During the 1980s and 1990s, when the immigrant flow to the United States was relatively less skilled, the factor proportions approach finds that immigration had an adverse impact on the relative wage of native-born workers who are high school dropouts at the lower end of the skill distribution.

Native-owned firms see that cities flooded by immigrants tend to pay lower wages, and often relocate to those cities. The flow of jobs to areas of high immigrant presence helps cushion immigration's adverse effect on the wage of competing workers in those localities.

Economic theory predicts that the entry of immigrants into a particular labor market will lower the wage of competing workers (workers who have the same types of skills as immigrants), and increase the wage of complementary workers (workers whose skills are more in demand because of immigration's effect on labor market conditions)

As immigrants learn about the host country, their human capital grows relative to that of the native-born, and economic assimilation occurs in the sense that immigrant earnings "catch up" to the earnings of natives

Push factors and pull factors