> Serious question: wouldn’t that be leaving less jobs open for Americans?
Immigration has much less of an impact on employment than you might expect in some cases — because immigrants also consume goods and services.
One widely cited example is the Mariel boatlift, where more than a hundred thousand Cubans immigrated to Florida over a short period of time. Subsequent economic analyses found essentially no change in wages or employment for native workers. (There was one study by Borjas which did find a change in wages for a subsection of workers, but this was widely criticized for basically p-hacking — split a population into enough subsections and you'll eventually find one that had a decrease in wages.)
Immigration has much less of an impact on employment than you might expect in some cases — because immigrants also consume goods and services.
One widely cited example is the Mariel boatlift, where more than a hundred thousand Cubans immigrated to Florida over a short period of time. Subsequent economic analyses found essentially no change in wages or employment for native workers. (There was one study by Borjas which did find a change in wages for a subsection of workers, but this was widely criticized for basically p-hacking — split a population into enough subsections and you'll eventually find one that had a decrease in wages.)
More reading:
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/5f6gqu/open_b...
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/btt4uo/the_le...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift