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This is a compelling paper that supports the moderate consensus in the US that any effective immigration reform legislation would include both legalization and some mechanism to address future flows (i.e., some variant of a temporary worker program). It should lend some empirical gravitas to this line of argument.

That said, I encourage the authors to consider one assumption that opens their paper to strong criticism in the US (perhaps they already have). They argue that much of the welfare gain observed for US households when the supply of immigrants increases is due to native workers moving up the occupational ladder and into higher wage jobs. However, this does not occur automatically.

Occupational and wage mobility among low-educated Americans has stalled in recent years. And US investment in training programs to raise the earnings of low-income Americans has declined dramatically. The unfortunate reality is that low-skilled workers currently in the US labor force face enormous obstacles in upgrading their skills and advancing on the occupational and wage ladders.

While the influx of low-skilled immigrants may provide incentives for American youth to pursue higher education, they often face liquidity constraints and are unable to access financing for higher education (especially among low-income and minority communities). Nor is it merely a question of increasing grants or scholarships. Many exit from the US secondary school system without the requisite knowledge base to be successful in post-secondary education – in part because they are concentrated in underperforming schools.

Both of these issues – stalling mobility among low-skilled US workers and inequality of opportunity in the US secondary and post-secondary education systems – have largely been peripheral to (or misunderstood) in the immigration reform debate. Attempting to tackle all three problems at once is a daunting undertaking. My point is not to diminish the merit of arguing that native workers gain from the temporary inflow of immigrant workers. Legalization is clearly the only realistic option for dealing with the 12 million or so unauthorized workers in the US and legalization cannot work without addressing future flows through some sort of temporary worker program. However, we should be cautious when claiming that low-skilled native workers will benefit automatically.