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Research papers on Immigration and the labor market

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

    David Card · 2001 · Journal of Labor Economics · 2,333 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.

  2. Public Attitudes Toward Immigration

    Jens Hainmueller, Daniel J. Hopkins · 2014 · Annual Review of Political Science · 1,667 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

  3. 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 · 1,445 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.

  4. Task Specialization, Immigration, and Wages

    Giovanni Peri, Chad Sparber · 2009 · American Economic Journal Applied Economics · 887 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

  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 · 882 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).

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

    G. Borjas, B. Chiswick · 2019 · Foundations of Migration Economics · 446 citations

    This chapter 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.

  7. IMMIGRATION, WAGES, AND COMPOSITIONAL AMENITIES

    David Card, Christian Dustmann, Ian Preston · 2011 · Journal of the European Economic Association · 419 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

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

    Simonetta Longhi, Peter Nijkamp, Jacques Poot · 2005 · Journal of Economic Surveys · 391 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

  9. 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

  12. Minimum wages and the labor market effects of immigration

    Anthony Edo, Hillel Rapoport · 2019 · Labour Economics · 54 citations

    This paper exploits the non-linearity in the level of minimum wages across U.S. States created by the coexistence of federal and state regulations to investigate the labor market effects of immigration. We find that the impact of immigration on the wages and employment of native workers within a given state-skill cell is more negative in States with low minimum wages and for workers with low education and experience. That is, the minimum wage tends to protect native workers from competition induced by low-skill immigration. The results are robust to instrumenting immigration and state effective minimum wages, and to implementing a difference-in-differences approach comparing States where eff

  13. Tradability and the Labor‐Market Impact of Immigration: Theory and Evidence From the United States

    Ariel T. Burstein, Gordon Hanson, Lin Tian, et al. · 2020 · Econometrica · 38 citations

    In this paper, we study how occupation (or industry) tradability shapes local labor‐market adjustment to immigration. Theoretically, we derive a simple condition under which the arrival of foreign‐born labor into a region crowds native‐born workers out of (or into) immigrant‐intensive jobs, thus lowering (or raising) relative wages in these occupations, and we explain why this process differs within tradable versus within nontradable activities. Using data for U.S. commuting zones over the period 1980–2012, we find—consistent with our theory—that a local influx of immigrants crowds out employment of native‐born workers in more relative to less immigrant‐intensive nontradable jobs, but has no

  14. Offshoring, Automation, Low-Skilled Immigration, and Labor Market Polarization

    Federico S. Mandelman, A. Zlate · 2022 · American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics · 34 citations

    We show that the observed polarization of employment toward the high- and low-skill occupations disappears when only native workers are considered. Instead, low-skilled immigration explains employment growth at the low tail of the skill distribution. Moreover, while employment rose, wages remained subdued in low-skill occupations. A data-disciplined structural model accounts for this evidence: Offshoring and automation negatively affect middle-skill occupations but enhance employment and wages for the high-skilled. Low-skill employment is sheltered from offshoring and automation, as it consists of manual, non-tradable services. However, low-skilled immigration depresses low-skill wages and e

  16. 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.

  17. Interacting Product and Labor Market Regulation and the Impact of Immigration on Native Wages

    Susanne Prantl, Alexandra Spitz-Oener · 2014 · SSRN Electronic Journal · 15 citations

    Does interacting product and labor market regulation alter the impact of immigration on wages of competing native workers? Focusing on the large, sudden and unanticipated wave of migration from East to West Germany after German reunification and allowing for endogenous immigration, we compare native wage reactions across different segments of the West German labor market: one segment without product and labor market regulation, to which standard immigration models best apply, one segment in which product and labor market regulation interact, and one segment covering intermediate groups of workers. We find that the wages of competing native West Germans respond negatively to the large influx

  18. Who competes with whom? Using occupation characteristics to estimate the impact of immigration on native wages

    James Sharpe, C. Bollinger · 2020 · Labour Economics · 13 citations

    Abstract Many studies have examined the impact of immigration on native-born wages. Some of these studies have relied upon education-experience groups to define labor markets and identify the wage elasticity with respect to immigrant labor supply. However, evidence suggests that immigrants’ educational attainment is treated differently in the labor market and constructing labor markets based upon this characteristic leads to potentially biased conclusions. We utilize O*NET occupational characteristics to form a different set of labor markets. Our analysis finds higher partial equilibrium effects on native wages than prior work using education-experience skill groups, as expected. These large

  20. High‐Skilled Immigration and the Labor Market: Evidence from the H‐1B Visa Program

    Patrick S. Turner · 2022 · Journal of Policy Analysis and Management · 7 citations

    This paper investigates the effect that high-skilled immigration has on the wages of U.S.born college graduates. College-educated immigrants study different subjects in college than do natives. I present descriptive evidence that workers with different college majors compete in different labor markets. I adapt a standard model of the U.S. labor market to allow for the imperfect substitutability of workers with different college majors. Because immigrants are twice as likely as natives to major in STEM, the model predicts that the wages of native STEM majors should fall relative to other majors as skilled immigration increases. Using an IV strategy that takes advantage of large changes in the

  21. FUNCTIONAL INSTRUMENTAL VARIABLE REGRESSION WITH AN APPLICATION TO ESTIMATING THE IMPACT OF IMMIGRATION ON NATIVE WAGES

    Dakyung Seong, Won‐Ki Seo · 2021 · Econometric Theory · 7 citations

    Functional linear regression has gained popularity as a statistical tool for studying the relationship between function-valued variables. However, in practice, it is hard to expect that the explanatory variables of interest are strictly exogenous, due to, for example, the presence of omitted variables and measurement error. This issue of endogeneity remains insufficiently explored, in spite of its empirical importance. To fill this gap, this article proposes new consistent FPCA-based instrumental variable estimators and develops their asymptotic properties in detail. Simulation experiments under a wide range of settings show that the proposed estimators perform considerably well. We apply ou

  22. The Role of Labor Market Institutions in the Impact of Immigration on Wages and Employment

    M. Foged, Linea Hasager, Vasil Yasenov · 2021 · The Scandinavian Journal of Economics · 4 citations

    We collect 1,030 previously estimated wage effects and 432 employment effects of immigration and document that the mean and median impact on the relative wage are negative and significantly different from the small positive mean and median impact 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 may shield native workers from relative wage consequences but reduce the average wage impact of immigration. We do not detect a significant and robust association for the employment effects. JEL classification

  23. Refugee Labor Market Access Increases Support for Immigration

    Anselm Hager, H. Hilbig, Sascha Riaz · 2023 · Comparative Political Studies · 4 citations

    Does the economic integration of refugees affect public attitudes toward migration? We assess this pertinent question by examining a policy change in Germany, where the government significantly eased labor market access for refugees in the majority of the country. Using administrative employment data, we show that the policy led to a substantial increase in refugee employment, while natives’ wages and employment rates remained unaffected. The policy also had a positive effect on natives’ attitudes toward migration. Voters exposed to more refugees in the labor market were two percentage points more likely to vote for pro-migration parties across both state and federal elections. Additional su

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