The United States took in more than a million immigrants per year in the late 1990s, more than at any other time in history. For humanitarian and many other reasons, this may be good news. But it's decidedly mixed news for the American economy--and positively bad news for the country's poorest citizens. Heaven's Door presents the most comprehensive, accessible, and up-to-date account yet of the economic impact of recent immigration on America. The book reveals that the benefits of immigration have been greatly exaggerated and that if the American people allow immigration to continue unabated and unmodified, they are supporting an astonishing transfer of wealth from the poorest people in the country, who are disproportionately minorities, to the richest.

In Heaven's Door, I carefully analyze immigrants' skills, national origins, welfare use, economic mobility, and impact on the labor market, as well as trace current trends in ethnic segregation. I also evaluate the implications of the evidence for the type of immigration policy the that United States should pursue. Some of the findings are dramatic:

Despite estimates that range into hundreds of billions of dollars, net annual gains from immigration are only about $8 billion.

In dragging down wages, immigration currently shifts tens of billions of dollars per year from workers to employers and users of immigrants' services.

Immigrants today are less skilled than their predecessors, more likely to re-quire public assistance, and far more likely to have children who remain in poor, segregated communities.

I conclude that in the current economic climate--which is less conducive to mass immigration of unskilled labor than past eras--it would be fair and wise to return immigration to the levels of the 1970s (roughly 500,000 per year) and institute policies to favor more skilled immigrants.