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According to the economic models, it is a no-brainer: a surge of low-skilled immigrants must increase the interest of workers, driving down wages at the cost of working-class Americans. Sen. Byron L. Dorgan, explaining why he opposes legislation to allow more legal immigration, said recently: "I don't think you need a professor to understand that when you export substantial cheap labor, it displaces American workers.

" Recent research suggests that the economic effects of immigration is not so simple. The effects are difficult to disentangle from other factors that have dampened wage growth for workers in recent decades, such as new technology, the decrease in manufacturing jobs, the fall in unionization, globalization and recessions.

Yes, even an influx of immigrants has helped increase the volatility of the lowest-skilled workers in recent decades, most economists agree. They argue about the size of the result; some say it is big while others see it as slight. Increased immigration - legal and illegal - aids keep inflation low, boosts rents and housing values, and also benefits the normal U.S. Citizen while burdening some state and local governments, other research finds. "Immigration supplies complete economic gains to a nation," wrote economist Albert Saiz, outlining the literature in a 2003 article for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

"Indeed, the U.S. Expertise as an immigrants nation is one of phenomenal economic growth. However, there are winners and losers in the brief run." The main losers in this nation are workers who do not have high school diplomas, particularly blacks and native-born Hispanics, according to George J. Borjas, a Harvard University economist who has studied immigration for several years. From 1980 through 2000, immigration decreased average wages for the nation's 10 million native-born guys without high school educations by 7.4 percent, Borjas composed in 2004. Other economists contend that the effect is significantly smaller - a wage reduction of close to 1 per cent - and has dissipated as Americans have become better educated.

The proportion of the adult labor force, such as immigrants, without high-school diplomas has fallen to just 10 percent. The proportion of immigrants from the U.S. Adult urban population nearly doubled from 1980 to 2000, from 9.5 to 18 percent, according to census figures cited by David Card, an economist at the University of California in Berkeley, in a paper presented in a Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia conference last year. The Washington area mimicked the national trend, with the immigrants proportion rising from 9.6 percent to 20.6 percent over those two decades. Immigrants arealso, on average, less schooled than native-born Americans. Looking in hundreds of the nation's urban areas where immigrants cluster, Card found that at 1980 and 2000, over a third of adult immigrants did not possess high school diplomas. The proportion of working-age natives in that education level dropped from 23 to 13 percent in 1980 to 2000, "More than offsetting the inflow of both less-educated immigrants." The wage gap between high school graduates and dropouts remained relatively constant from 1979 to 2000, with the graduates earning 25 to 30 percent greater, Card wrote.

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