Immigration has become one of the most important topics of popular debate in the UK. While the balance of public opinion is to reduce immigration, the numbers migrating to Britain has increased sharply over the last decade. Recent years have also seen a series of changes in immigration policy which have been accompanied by a heightened interest in research findings that can help to guide policy in the future. The papers in this Feature address some of the key economic issues. Do immigrants reduce wages and employment rates for non-immigrant workers? And what are the adjustment mechanisms through which immigrant labour is absorbed into the economy? How do immigrants perform in the UK labour market and how and why do they suffer disadvantage in the competition for jobs? There is a large empirical literature that debates these questions for the US and other traditional countries of immigration. For Britain, the literature is smaller and has not progressed as far. The articles in this Feature aim to advance the discussion, first with an examination of recent findings for the US, and then with three studies that address some of the same issues for the UK. To put the UK evidence into context, the first article is an assessment for the US by one of the leading US economists on the economics of migration. David Card investigates the impact of migration on US wages and employment, as well as the various mechanisms that may lead to adjustment. He also addresses the performance of immigrants in the US economy. Here he takes a slightly more general stand than much of the literature by considering the intergenerational adaptation of immigrants. His conclusions on employment and wage impact are in line with much of the previous literature: although immigration has strong effects on relative supplies of different skill groups, local labour market outcomes for low skilled natives are not much affected by these relative supply shocks. The evidence suggests that this is due to adjustment within industries, rather than across industries, to skill-group specific relative supply shocks. Card also argues that the evidence is not suggestive of displacement effects of native workers from one locality to another, an argument that is often used to account for small wage effects in studies based on local labour market analysis. Finally, Card’s analysis on immigrant assimilation supports the view that first generation immigrants do not on average catch up with natives in terms of economic performance, but shows a strong educational progress of second generation immigrants, where most catch up with children of natives. His paper provides an overall positive assessment of the new migration into the US. These issues remain controversial in the US. Borjas (2003) argues that the negative wage effects from immigration can be observed at the national level. There is disagreement about how local labour markets adjust to immigration and The Economic Journal, 115 (November), F297–F299. Royal Economic Society 2005. PublishedbyBlackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.