Across the political spectrum, there’s a widely held view that the decades-long increase in immigration to the U.S. has put U.S. workers in competition with new immigrants for scarce jobs and has led to depressed wages and working conditions. Ruth Milkman’s important and timely new book, Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat, upends this notion, arguing that it gets cause and effect wrong. Instead, she contends that immigrants have tended to fill jobs already badly degraded, thanks largely to deregulation and de-unionization. In an interview with Samir Sonti, she speaks about the particular industries in which this trend has played out, as well as the political implications of failing to properly understand the role that immigrant workers play in the U.S. economy.