The intuition that adding workers to a labour market must lower wages treats labour as a fixed quantity of work to be divided. Arrivals also consume: they rent housing, buy food and use services, which creates demand for labour alongside the supply they add. Empirical estimates of the effect of immigration on average native wages cluster near zero for this reason, in studies using very different methods. This is one of the more consistent findings in applied economics, and it is routinely mistaken for a claim that nobody is affected, which it is not. An average near zero is entirely compatible with meaningful losses for some workers offset by gains for others.