Though there is a relative lack of research examining immigration and native well-being, there are a multitude of studies that explore other channels through which migration affects the native population, from wages and labor market performance to internal immigration rates and population growth.
They find that when immigrants are not very assimilated, they have close to a zero effect on native well-being, but immigrants who are "intermediately assimilated" have the highest effect on native well-being (p.24).
It is important to note the small magnitude of our results are to be expected, as immigration is likely to have a small overall impact on native well-being compared to more relevant issues to natives, such as one's subjective health or marriage status.
Our results are small in magnitude and in practical application; only large immigrant flows would affect native well-being significantly.
The results are similar when we interact immigration flows with years of education (of the native), suggesting that the effects on native well-being due to immigration do not depend on the education level of the native.
Their paper concludes that immigration provides a "robust, positive effect" on native well-being.
Utilizing lagged immigration variables also enables us to analyze any dynamic effects that immigrant flows may have on native well-being.
The variation in natives' well-being can be explained by a variety of factors, including immigrant assimilation, the inflexible European labor market, and the complementary effects of immigration on the country of migration.
On the other hand, the problem could be more serious; the achievement gap between immigrant and native students might well be affected by the social segregation of students across schools with different resources and students' background (Schneeweis 2006; Entorf and Minoiu 2005).
The portrayals of these "natives" meanwhile, may well be deliberately wafer-thin, presumably in order to reflect the way the Europeans view them, but they remain correspondingly unsatisfying.
When a writer immerses two standard Ugly Americans in a mob of central-casting hungry natives, he may as well be boiling an egg.
