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Research papers on Immigration and the labor market

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  1. Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native

    Patrick Wolfe · 2006 · Journal of Genocide Research · 6,332 citations

    The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. Land is life—or, at least, land is necessary for life. Thus contests for land can be—indeed, often are—contests for li...

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  2. Immigrant Inflows, Native Outflows, and the Local Labor Market Impacts of Higher Immigration

    David Card · 2001 · Journal of Labor Economics · 1,789 citations

    This article uses 1990 census data to study the effects of immigrant inflows on occupation‐specific labor market outcomes. I find that intercity mobility rates of natives and earlier immigrants are insensitive to immigrant inflows. However, occupation‐specific wages and employment rates are systematically lower in cities with higher relative supplies of workers in a given occupation. The results imply that immigrant inflows over the 1980s reduced wages and employment rates of low‐skilled natives in traditional gateway cities like Miami and Los Angeles by 1–3 percentage points.

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  3. Public Attitudes Toward Immigration

    Jens Hainmueller, Daniel J. Hopkins · 2014 · Annual Review of Political Science · 1,689 citations

    Immigrant populations in many developed democracies have grown rapidly, and so too has an extensive literature on natives' attitudes toward immigration. This research has developed from two theoretical foundations, one grounded in political economy, the other in political psychology. These two literatures have developed largely in isolation from one another, yet the conclusions that emerge from each are strikingly similar. Consistently, immigration attitudes show little evidence of being strongly correlated with personal economic circumstances. Instead, research finds that immigration attitudes are shaped by sociotropic concerns about its cultural impacts—and to a lesser extent its economic

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  4. The Labor Demand Curve is Downward Sloping: Reexamining the Impact of Immigration on the Labor Market

    George J. Borjas · 2003 · National Bureau of Economic Research · 1,444 citations

    Immigration is not evenly balanced across groups of workers that have the same education but differ in their work experience, and the nature of the supply imbalance changes over time. This paper develops a new approach for estimating the labor market impact of immigration by exploiting this variation in supply shifts across education-experience groups. I assume that similarly educated workers with different levels of experience participate in a national labor market and are not perfect substitutes. The analysis indicates that immigration lowers the wage of competing workers: a 10 percent increase in supply reduces wages by 3 to 4 percent.

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  5. How Much Do Immigration and Trade Affect Labor Market Outcomes?

    George J. Borjas, Richard B. Freeman, Lawrence F. Katz, et al. · 1997 · Brookings Papers on Economic Activity · 894 citations

    "This paper provides new estimates of the impact of immigration and trade on the U.S. labor market.... We examine the relation between economic outcomes for native workers and immigrant flows to regional labor markets.... We...use the factor proportions approach to examine the contributions of immigration and trade to recent changes in U.S. educational wage differentials and attempt to provide a broader assessment of the impact of immigration on the incomes of U.S. natives." Comments and discussion by John DiNardo, John M. Abowd, and others are included (pp. 68-85).

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  6. Task Specialization, Immigration, and Wages

    Giovanni Peri, Chad Sparber · 2009 · American Economic Journal Applied Economics · 893 citations

    Large inflows of less educated immigrants may reduce wages paid to comparably-educated, native-born workers. However, if less educated foreign- and native-born workers specialize in different production tasks, because of different abilities, immigration will cause natives to reallocate their task supply, thereby reducing downward wage pressure. Using occupational task-intensity data from the O*NET dataset and individual US census data, we demonstrate that foreign-born workers specialize in occupations intensive in manual-physical labor skills while natives pursue jobs more intensive in communication-language tasks. This mechanism can explain why economic analyses find only modest wage conseq

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  7. Native Internal Migration and the Labor Market Impact of Immigration

    George J. Borjas · 2006 · The Journal of Human Resources · 446 citations

    This paper presents a theoretical and empirical study of how immigration influences the joint determination of the wage structure and internal migration behavior for native-born workers in local labor markets. Using data from the 1960–2000 decennial censuses, the study shows that immigration is associated with lower in-migration rates, higher out-migration rates, and a decline in the growth rate of the native workforce. The native migration response attenuates the measured impact of immigration on wages in a local labor market by 40 to 60 percent, depending on whether the labor market is defined at the state or metropolitan area level.

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  8. IMMIGRATION, WAGES, AND COMPOSITIONAL AMENITIES

    David Card, Christian Dustmann, Ian Preston · 2011 · Journal of the European Economic Association · 420 citations

    There is strong public opposition to increased immigration throughout Europe. Given the modest economic impacts of immigration estimated in most studies, the depth of anti-immigrant sentiment is puzzling. Immigration, however, does not just affect wages and taxes. It also changes the composition of the local population, threatening the compositional amenities that natives derive from their neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. In this paper we use a simple latent-factor model, combined with data for 21 countries from the 2002 European Social Survey (ESS), to measure the relative importance of economic and compositional concerns in driving opinions about immigration policy. The ESS included

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  9. A Meta-Analytic Assessment of the Effect of Immigration on Wages

    Simonetta Longhi, Peter Nijkamp, Jacques Poot · 2005 · Journal of Economic Surveys · 392 citations

    Abstract. In our increasingly interconnected and open world, international migration is becoming an important socioeconomic phenomenon for many countries. Since the early 1980s, many studies about the impact of immigration on host labour markets have been undertaken. Borjas (2003, The labor demand curve is downward sloping: reexamining the impact of immigration on the labor market. Quarterly Journal of Economics 118(4): 1335–1374) noted that the estimated effect of immigration on the wage of native workers varies widely from study to study and sometimes even within the same study. In addition, these effects cluster around zero. Such a small effect is a rather surprising outcome, given that i

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  10. Rethinking the Effects of Immigration on Wages

    Gianmarco I.P. Ottaviano, Giovanni Peri · 2006 · National Bureau of Economic Research · 371 citations

    This paper asks the following question: what was the effect of surging immigration on average and individual wages of U.S.-born workers during the period 1990-2004? We emphasize the need for a general equilibrium approach to analyze this problem. The impact of immigrants on wages of U.S.-born workers can be evaluated only by accounting carefully for labor market and capital market interactions in production. Using such a general equilibrium approach we estimate that immigrants are imperfect substitutes for U.S.-born workers within the same education-experience-gender group (because they choose different occupations and have different skills). Moreover, accounting for a reasonable speed of ad

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  12. Immigration, Race, and Labor: Unionization and Wages in the Canadian Labor Market

    Jeffery G. Reitz, Anil Verma · 2004 · Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society · 21 citations

    In Canada, most racial minorities have lower rates of unionization than do members of the majority workforce. Data from the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (N= 32,634) show that racial minority immigrants assimilate into unionization over time. However, unionization reduces net minority wage disadvantages only slightly. Union race relations policies should place more emphasis on collective bargaining as well as on unionization.

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  15. The role of labor market institutions in the impact of immigration on wages and employment*

    Mette Foged, Linea Hasager, Vasil Yasenov · 2022 · The Scandinavian Journal of Economics · 7 citations

    AbstractWe collect 1,030 previously estimated wage effects and 432 employment effects of immigration, and we document that the mean and median effects on the relative wage are negative and significantly different from the small positive mean and median effects on the average wage. The pattern is reversed for employment effects where the magnitudes are also smaller. Combining the effect sizes with measures of labor market institutions, we find that institutions might shield native workers from relative wage consequences but reduce the average wage effect of immigration. We do not detect a significant and robust association for the employment effects.

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  19. The Impact of Immigration and Integration Policies On Immigrant-Native Labor Market Hierarchies

    Guzi Martin, Kahanec Martin, Lucia Mýtna Kureková · 2022 · MUNI ECON Working Papers

    Across European Union (EU) labor markets, immigrant and native populations exhibit disparate labor market outcomes, signifying widespread labor market hierarchies. While significant resources have been invested in migration and integration policies, it remains unclear whether these contribute to or mitigate labor market hierarchies between natives and immigrants. Using a longitudinal model based on individual-level EU LFS and country-level DEMIG POLICY and POLMIG databases, we explore variation in changes of immigration and integration policies across Western EU member states to study how they are associated with labor market hierarchies in terms of unemployment and employment quality gaps b

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  20. Wages for Immigration!: Labor and Social Reproduction Under Contemporary Capitalism

    Ashley Bohrer · 2020 · Spectre Journal

    Taking global care chains as a starting point, Ashley J. Bohrer points to the numerous ways in which immigration constitutes unpaid social reproductive labor intrinsic to the capitalist system. The polemical call for “Wages for Immigration!” dramatizes the fact that capitalism can never pay for the demands it makes on racialized and exploited care workers.

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