text:  Immigrants are not bananas. They buy stuff. They start businesses. They do all kinds of things that help shape the economy. Now, this Merrill Boatlift paper was written about one place at one time. But since David Card wrote it, variations on this experiment have been done repeatedly. And over and over again, economists have found the same thing. In the long run, immigrants do not really make unemployment go up or wages go down. More often than not, there is no detectable effect.