“The research shows ... that immigrants have largely migrated in this country to regions where the demand for labor has been very strong. So the evidence seems to indicate that immigrants have filled a gap in the labor market,” says Dr. Walden, an economist with the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service. “They have gone to fast-growing regions where there has been a big demand for workers in, say, the service industry and the construction industry. So from that point of view, they have helped. They have helped meet the supply of labor, and they have helped supply meet demand.

“Now, on the other hand, clearly if you take those fast-growing labor markets [and] you did not have the influx of immigrants, pressure on wages would have been upward, so that people who are already in those industry probably would have seen higher rates of pay.

“That is to say that immigrants have probably had an impact of putting downward pressure on wages,” he concludes.