Baku, TurkicWorld
Anti-immigrant rhetoric has gone mainstream across much of the world. In the United States, deportation raids have become routine. In Europe, governments keep tightening restrictions. In Russia, officials are preparing to bar tens of thousands of migrants from working in ride-hailing and delivery jobs. The justifications are predictable: immigrants are said to drive up crime, stall innovation, or steal jobs from locals. But decades of research and data tell a very different story. Those arguments don’t stand up to scrutiny, TurkicWorld reports citing BakuNetwork.
The Labor Market as a Political Weapon
In the U.S., politicians often claim immigrants undercut American workers or discourage technological progress. In Russia, nearly half the population believes migrants are taking away jobs. Yet the facts point in the opposite direction. In reality, most Americans acknowledge that immigrants fill roles the local workforce tends to avoid—low-paying, physically demanding, or otherwise undesirable work.
A massive body of data spanning dozens of countries reaches a consistent conclusion: large-scale immigration does not push down wages or spike unemployment among native workers. Even in cases of sudden inflows—like Florida in the early 1980s, when Cuban refugees arrived en masse—local wages and employment rates held steady. The most vulnerable groups, often in direct competition with migrants, saw no measurable harm either.
Whenever researchers have tried to prove otherwise, their claims have collapsed under more rigorous analysis. The myth that immigration erodes native workers’ earnings simply doesn’t hold up.
Innovation and New Jobs
Another popular talking point is that cheap immigrant labor stifles innovation. But history shows just the opposite. Technological advances have always created new industries and job categories—including many that don’t require advanced degrees. Innovation doesn’t eliminate work; it reshapes it.
The evidence is overwhelming. Postcolonial France absorbed hundreds of thousands of returnees from Algeria after 1962. Israel’s population jumped by 12 percent in the early 1990s as immigrants poured in from the former Soviet Union. The United States, in the first half of the 20th century, faced massive waves of Europeans. Scandinavian countries have closely tracked their own migration trends in recent decades. Across all these cases, no significant negative effect on wages or employment was found. In some instances, job opportunities for native-born workers actually grew.
By now, the consensus is clear: over the long haul, immigration barely affects the wages of native workers. That conclusion is backed by decades of studies and cross-country comparisons.
Why the Numbers Don’t Match the Myths
The explanation is straightforward. Immigrants largely take on physical labor—construction, agriculture, cleaning. Locals, by contrast, more often work in roles that require language skills and communication—management, sales, administration. These jobs pay better, and as immigrants fill lower-tier positions, native workers often climb higher on the economic ladder. In many cases, the presence of migrants even boosts overall income for locals.
The effect is particularly striking for women. Affordable access to childcare and domestic help allows highly skilled women to stay in the workforce and advance their careers. That, in turn, raises household income and strengthens the economy as a whole.
Immigration, in short, is less a threat to labor markets than a force that reshapes them. The numbers don’t lie: the fearmongering does.
The Deepening Division of Labor
History offers some telling lessons. Take the United States in the 1930s, when a program that brought in Mexican farmworkers was abruptly shut down. The idea was to free up jobs for Americans. Instead, the opposite happened: managerial and supervisory positions shrank, while many Americans were pushed into tougher, lower-paying manual labor.
It’s a reminder that migrants don’t just expand the labor supply—they also create demand. They rent apartments, buy groceries, use services. In other words, they fuel the domestic market. And when governments restrict them from being consumers, the effect can turn negative. After the Berlin Wall fell, for instance, Czech workers were allowed into border regions of Germany only for the day—no overnight stays, no local spending. The result? German wages and employment levels actually fell.
Another overlooked factor is immigrant entrepreneurship. In the U.S., immigrants are more likely than natives to start businesses—and to grow them into companies employing dozens of people. These firms don’t just integrate immigrants themselves; they create jobs for locals, too. By the early 1990s, nearly half of immigrants in America were working in immigrant-founded businesses.
Cheap Labor vs. Technology: Conflict or Symbiosis?
Critics often argue that cheap labor kills the incentive to innovate. The logic sounds neat but turns out to be simplistic. It’s true that labor shortages can accelerate mechanization. After the devastating Mississippi River flood of 1927, many Black workers left the delta. Landowners, suddenly without their usual workforce, invested heavily in machinery, making agriculture in that region far more mechanized than in neighboring areas untouched by the disaster.
Something similar happened decades later when the U.S. shut down its guest worker program for Mexican farm labor. Farmers who had long relied on manual workers had no choice but to adopt new technologies. Tomato-picking machines became the norm in California—where before, nearly everything had been harvested by hand. But the outcome wasn’t all positive: automation raised production costs, cut into farmers’ incomes, and forced them to abandon crops like asparagus, strawberries, and lettuce that couldn’t be machine-harvested. The only clear winners were the companies selling the machines.
In more recent years, Washington has tried repeatedly to squeeze migrants out of agriculture, only to run into the same brick wall: there are neither enough local workers nor the technology to replace them.
Different Jobs, Different Innovations
What studies consistently show is that the type of innovation depends on which segment of the labor market is affected. Rising wages for low-skill workers do push employers toward automating routine tasks. But rising wages for high-skill professionals often have the opposite effect: companies scale back investment in new technologies, because highly skilled labor is hard to replace and costly to replicate.
The reason is simple: you can automate repetitive, routine tasks. You can’t automate creativity. It’s easier to build a machine that harvests lettuce than one that replicates the work of an engineer or designer. Which is why rising wages at the bottom nudge firms toward machinery, while rising wages at the top slow innovation—it’s cheaper to keep the specialists than to invent machines to replace them.
Labor and Technology: A Partnership, Not a Rivalry
History makes clear that technology and labor don’t cancel each other out—they evolve together. When cheap, low-skill labor dominates an economy, technology adapts to it. When a large, educated professional class emerges, innovations become “smarter” to meet the demand.
That dynamic explains why the presence of low-skill immigrants sustains employment in that sector—businesses would rather rely on human labor than invest in costly machines. But as soon as manual labor becomes more expensive, firms pivot to technology. That shift, in turn, creates new demand for educated, skilled workers.
In short, immigration doesn’t just fill jobs—it reshapes the trajectory of innovation itself.
Lessons from Global Development
Here lies the key to understanding why advanced economies and developing ones take such different paths. Countries like China, or others still in the industrialization stage not so long ago, couldn’t simply import Western technology wholesale. Without a critical mass of trained specialists, sophisticated machines and systems were pointless. But once that workforce emerged, these countries quickly caught up—and in some cases, raced ahead.
The bottom line: technology never exists in a vacuum. Low-skilled labor and innovation may compete in the short run, but in the long term they form a chain. Cheap labor lays the groundwork, skilled labor drives technological breakthroughs, and innovation, in turn, generates new jobs and new demands for knowledge.
History’s industrial playbook makes the point clear. In the 19th century, technological progress was aimed largely at boosting the productivity of unskilled workers and automating the tasks of costly artisans. That’s what fueled America’s industrial surge, powered by millions of immigrants who poured in between 1840 and 1920. A flood of cheap labor allowed factories to multiply, production to expand, and goods to become more affordable.
But soon the trajectory shifted. With education on the rise—pushed in part by workers themselves, who needed basic literacy just to operate the new machines—a class of skilled specialists began to emerge. Technology adapted to them, enhancing their productivity while steadily replacing unskilled jobs. By the 20th century, wages for educated workers rose consistently, while the earnings of less-educated workers fell as machines took their place.
It’s the basic logic of economics: scarcity drives value. When oil prices spike, investors flock to renewables. When labor costs rise, companies chase automation. But every dollar spent on automation is a dollar not spent elsewhere—resources are always finite.
Innovation Creates Jobs—It Doesn’t Eliminate Them
Automation is often cast as a job-killer, but the reality is more complex. It doesn’t erase work—it redistributes it. Each industrial revolution has reshaped employment, but none has erased the need for human labor. Two hundred years ago, most people worked in agriculture. A century ago, manufacturing dominated. Today, the majority in advanced economies work in services, which account for the bulk of GDP.
There are three main reasons why automation tends to create as much work as it displaces:
Lower costs, higher demand. Automation cuts production costs, making goods cheaper and boosting demand. To meet that demand, companies need more workers—albeit in different roles. ATMs are a classic example. They reduced the need for tellers handling basic transactions, but slashed banks’ operating costs so dramatically that they could open more branches. The result: the number of bank employees in the U.S. actually went up, not down, even as ATMs spread by the hundreds of thousands.
New demand for equipment and production. Every wave of automation sparks fresh demand for machinery—and for the people who build, sell, and service it. When tractors replaced horses in farming, some labor was displaced, but entirely new industries sprang up around manufacturing and maintaining farm equipment.
Servicing the machines. Every piece of technology requires maintenance. At first, only highly trained specialists handle it. Over time, processes standardize, and lower-skilled workers take over routine upkeep. That’s how the factory system displaced artisans in the 19th century: complex crafts were simplified, systematized, and passed down to factory labor.
Of course, not every push toward automation pays off. Over-automating can be a disaster. One automaker famously tried to fully robotize its electric vehicle assembly lines—only to miss production targets and watch costs balloon. The company’s CEO eventually admitted he had overestimated robots and underestimated the efficiency of human workers.
Modern platforms like Uber or Amazon drive the point home. These are high-tech systems, but they couldn’t exist without millions of people doing relatively simple jobs—delivering packages, driving cars, picking goods from warehouses—tasks that require little more than a smartphone. It’s the fusion of digital platforms and affordable labor that makes these services mass-market, affordable, and efficient.
The lesson is unmistakable: automation never happens in isolation. It either opens up entirely new lines of work or leans on existing labor pools to make itself viable. Machines don’t kill the job market—they reshape it, redistributing tasks and creating new niches for people to fill.
Over-Automation: The Illusion of Progress and an Economic Trap
In recent decades, the United States has drifted into a troubling imbalance: companies are pouring money into technologies that eliminate human labor without creating new roles for people. The problem is compounded by a skewed tax system: work is heavily taxed, while capital is effectively subsidized by the government. The outcome is easy to read—productivity stalls, inequality widens, and corporations cut back not only on workers but on genuine innovation that could actually raise efficiency.
The rise of artificial intelligence has only fueled fears of a future where humans are sidelined altogether. But reality is less apocalyptic: AI is still confined to narrow tasks, and in most areas, the human brain remains irreplaceable. That said, many professions will inevitably feel the squeeze, and economies will need safety valves. The only way to avoid a shock is to ensure that automation generates new work for people—work that boosts overall productivity.
The biggest opportunities for this kind of shift lie in education, healthcare, and the application of new technologies across industry. To make sure automation doesn’t turn into humanity’s adversary, governments will need to step up—with retraining programs, incentives for socially useful innovations, and policies that reward companies for creating value rather than just cutting labor costs.
There’s a telling parallel here: migrants often function in the economy much like machines. They take on certain tasks, but in doing so they expand the division of labor and open up new opportunities. Demographics in developing countries suggest this pool of workers will shrink over time—lifespans are lengthening, families are smaller, birthrates are falling. That means migration flows will slow, and automation will inevitably take on a bigger role.
Japan, Germany, and South Korea have already hit this wall. With limited migration and aging populations, they’ve turned to robots in force—today deploying between 14 and 20 industrial robots per thousand workers. The U.S., by contrast, uses just 8. But here’s the paradox: despite their armies of robots, the economies of Japan, Germany, and South Korea have grown far more slowly in recent decades than either the U.S., which leaned on immigration, or China, which tapped vast pools of internal migrants.
As populations age and labor grows more expensive, advanced economies will increasingly rely on exporting automation technologies. Meanwhile, countries currently benefiting from cheap migrant labor will likely keep reaping gains in the future. Catch-up has its advantages: instead of wasting billions on untested, often dead-end R&D, these nations can adopt proven, ready-made solutions.
And there’s another ripple effect. Migrant labor frees up time and energy for educated women, enabling them to build careers. That, in turn, expands the pool of skilled professionals—without which automation itself can’t thrive. The result is a kind of feedback loop: migration shores up today’s labor markets while simultaneously laying the groundwork for deeper technological modernization tomorrow.
