Furthermore, the earning power of these poor immigrants is deteriorating and is likely to remain low throughout their working lives. In a very real sense, we are importing poverty. Immigrants are a drain on national, state and local budgets. Part of that price is lost productivity. Business and social transaction costs rise, as time, effort, and money are spent overcoming language and cultural barriers.
Communication becomes difficult, often due to language barriers.
In 1996, analysis of all the metropolitan areas with over a million residents found that the higher the immigrant population in the city, the smaller the middle class share. The jobs immigration does create are often for other immigrants and at the expense of Americans. The emergence of an immigrant niche is an instance of discontinuity in which prior recruitment patterns are disrupted. A GAO study found that a decade of heavy immigration to Los Angeles had changed the janitorial industry from a mostly unionized native black workforce to one of non-unionized Hispanic immigrants. According to the Census, the employment of black Americans as hotel workers in California dropped 30 percent in the 1980s, while the number of immigrants with such jobs rose 166 percent.