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On Saturday, the economist Tyler Cowen published a New York Times piece interrogating the common view that immigrants reduce the number of jobs available to native-born Americans. "It turns out that the continuing arrival of immigrants to American shores is encouraging business activity here, thereby producing more jobs, according to a new study," writes Cowen. "The study notes that when companies move production offshore, they pull away not only low-wage jobs but also many related jobs, which can include high-skilled managers, tech repairmen and others. But hiring immigrants even for low-wage jobs helps keep many kinds of jobs in the United States."
And speaking of offshoring, Cowen goes on to note that the relationship between globalization and domestic job loss is more nuanced than many people believe. "For all the talk of the dangers of offshoring, there is a related trend that we might call in-shoring," he writes. "Dell or Apple computers may be assembled overseas, for example, but those products aid many American businesses at home and allow them to expand here ... It's not all about one group of people taking jobs from another. Job creation and destruction are so intertwined that, over all, the authors find no statistically verifiable connection between offshoring and net creation of American jobs."