This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 13th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It's always fun to find a fact that confounds a convenient narrative.

For conservatives who are skeptical of both increasing

immigration and unions, what if it turned out that immigration put downward pressure on unionization

rates?

Cato's Alex Narastis says during a decades long period in

recent American history that's exactly what happened.

Among the many complaints we hear about immigrants impact on the United States of

America, one is related to unions and you sort of poke a hole in that.

Could you just basically detail that? My colleagues and co-authors and I, we took a look at the impact that immigration has on unionization in the United States since 1980.

And this is a field that has not been intensively researched by academics or other policy analysts.

So we used a method developed by George Borjos at Harvard that he developed to understand how immigrants

impact the wages of Americans and we basically took the same method that he used to

instead looking at wages we looked at unionization rates and we found that

immigration from 1980 to 2020 is responsible for an almost 6% percentage point decline in unionization in the United States,

which accounts for about 30% of the overall decline in union density during that time period.

And the effect is that a 1 percentage point increase in the immigrant share of workers corresponds to about half a percentage point

decrease in the unionization. So to jump right to the politics here for people who are critical of immigration or

outright opposed to greater immigration to the United States, what should this tell them?

Well, this should tell them because most of those folks who are skeptical the benefits of

immigration are on the political right or our conservatives Republicans who also have a historical antipathy to unions in the United States.

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