Immigrants don't steal jobs

Delocalization and immigration are often held responsible for the destruction of jobs in Italy's manufacturing sector. However, while the decline of these sectors over the last decades is indisputable, it is difficult to say that globalization is responsible. On the one hand, delocalization of production processes or using immigrants to carry out those jobs directly reduces the number of jobs available to Italian workers.
On the other hand, the reduction of costs associated with these types of reorganization promotes the competitiveness of companies, which are then able to generate new jobs for Italian workers, as well. The overall effect depends on various factors which are also institutional in nature, including not only the job and product markets' flexibility, but also the ability to reinvent the organization and division of tasks inside the company.
In order to better understand how to effectively manage these challenges and opportunities, comparative empirical analyses at the international level that are able to highlight the strong and weak points of various country systems would be incredibly important. As we wait for those analyses which are not yet available, the state of this discussion can be exemplified by a recent study made in the United States on 58 manufacturing sectors from 2000 to 2007 (Ottaviano, Peri, Wright, Immigration, offshoring and American jobs, National Bureau of Economic Research, working paper No. 16439, Cambridge, Mass., 2010).
The study rightly considers a noteworthy but often forgotten fact, which is that like other Western countries, the United States has also seen a structural drop in the manufacturing trade over the last decades which is due to the transition from an industrial economy to a service economy, which in and of itself has little to do with globalization. From this viewpoint, the question that needs to be asked is if the manufacturing sectors which are most exposed to delocalization or immigration have lost more or less jobs for Americans, compared to other sectors.
According to the study, delocalization has reduced the quota of jobs for Americans and immigrants, and while immigration has certainly encroached upon the quota of delocalized jobs, it has not had significant effects on the quota of jobs for Americans. In terms of job tasks, delocalization has pushed American workers towards tasks which on average are more complex and less routine, and pushed immigrant workers towards less complex and more routine tasks. To the contrary, immigration does not seem to have had a significant effect on the type of tasks carried out by American workers. If we look at the levels of occupation instead of the quota, delocalization has not had any significant effect on the numbers of jobs for Americans, whereas immigration seems to have had a small, positive effect on those numbers.
This demonstrates that delocalization and immigration actually do have a positive effect on corporate competitiveness, manifested in a relative expansion of jobs for American workers in the sectors which are most exposed to those phenomena.Together, these results indicate that, by specializing in less complex tasks, immigrants have reduced the range of delocalized tasks without greatly influencing the level of occupation or type of task carried out by American workers. However, workers abroad have taken away tasks that are somewhat complex from American workers, pushing them towards more complex and less routine ones.
Despite this, the positive effect of delocalization on competitiveness and on companies' ability to expand has more than indirectly neutralized any negative effects on the overall level of occupation of American workers.

This is what happened in the United States from 2000 to 2007. Whether this has happened or could happen in less flexible economies, (inside and outside the corporation) like those of Italy and other continental European countries, remains to be seen.