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tt0377744 writes:

It seems self-evident that moving from a lower-income country to a higher-income country can bring about enormous increases in a person’s income (e.g., multiplying it several-fold), dwarfing the effect of any sort of direct-aid intervention. But there are worries: Does letting more workers into a wealthy country take jobs from people already working there? Or does the competition for jobs reduce wages all around? These possibilities are a particular concern as they apply to low-skill workers, who are poorer.

David Roodman was hired to review of the evidence for potential side effects of immigration for the GiveWell charity research firm, a sort of "consumers reports" for charities.

Among his findings were:

• There is almost no evidence of anything close to one-to-one crowding out by new immigrant arrivals to the job market in industrial countries. Most studies find that 10% growth in the immigrant “stock” changes natives’ earnings by between –2% and +2%. Although serious questions can be raised about the reliability of most studies, the scarcity of evidence for great pessimism stands as a fact. The economies of destination countries largely appear flexible enough to absorb new arrivals, especially given time.
• The group that appears most vulnerable to competitive pressure from new low-skill migrants is recent low-skill migrants. This possibility is easy to miss when talking of the impacts of “immigrants” on “natives.” Yet it stands to reason: a newly arrived Mexican with less than a high school education competes most directly with an earlier-arrived Mexican with less than a high school education.
• One factor dampening the economic side effects of immigration is that immigrants are consumers as well as producers. They increase domestic demand for goods and services, perhaps even more quickly than they increase domestic production (@Hercowitz and Yashiv 2002@), since they must consume as soon as they arrive. They expand the economic pie even as they compete for a slice. This is not to suggest that the market mechanism is perfect—adjustment to new arrivals is not instantaneous and may be incomplete—but the mechanism does operate.
• A second dampener is that in industrial economies, the capital supply tends to expand along with the workforce. More workers leads to more offices and more factories. Were receiving economies not flexible in this way, they would not be rich. This mechanism too may not be complete or immediate, but it is substantial in the long run: since the industrial revolution, population has doubled many times in the US and other now-wealthy nations, and the capital stock has kept pace, so that today there is more capital per worker than 200 years ago.
• A third dampener is that while workers who are similar compete, ones who are different complement. An expansion in the diligent manual labor available to the home renovation business can spur that industry to grow, which will increase its demand for other kinds of workers, from skilled general contractors who can manage complex projects for English-speaking clients to scientists who develop new materials for home building. Symmetrically, an influx of high-skill workers can increase demand for low-skill ones. More computer programmers means more tech businesses, which means more need for janitors and security guards. Again, the effect is certain, though its speed and size are not.

His findings indicate that more low-skill immigration would stimulate employment in the kind of high-skilled professions that suffer from the wage-depression effects of the H1B program.