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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 E. Card · 2001 · Journal of Labor Economics · 2,404 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. Minimum wages and the labor market effects of immigration

    Anthony Edo, Hillel Rapoport · 2019 · Labour Economics · 55 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

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

    Ariel T. Burstein, Gordon H. Hanson, Lin Tian, et al. · 2020 · Econometrica · 42 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

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

    Federico S. Mandelman, A. Zlate · 2022 · American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics · 36 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

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  7. 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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  9. Immigration, wages, and employment under informal labor markets

    Lukas Delgado-Prieto · 2021 · Journal of Population Economics · 18 citations

    This paper studies the labor market impacts of the Venezuelan immigration in Colombia. Exploiting spatial variation in exposure, I find a negative effect on native wages driven by the informal sector (where immigrants are concentrated) and a reduction in native employment in the formal sector (where the minimum wage binds for many workers). To explain this, I build a model in which a firm substitutes formal for informal labor in response to lower informal wages. Consistent with the model’s predictions, I document that the decrease in formal employment is driven by small firms that use both labor types in production and by workers earning the minimum wage.

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

    S. Prantl, Alexandra Spitz-Oener · 2014 · SSRN Electronic Journal · 17 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

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

    James Sharpe, Christopher R. Bollinger · 2020 · Labour Economics · 14 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

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  13. 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 · 8 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

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

    Patrick S. Turner · 2022 · Journal of Policy Analysis and Management · 8 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

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

    Dakyung Seong, Won-Ki Seo · 2021 · Econometric Theory · 8 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

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  16. Refugee Labor Market Access Increases Support for Immigration

    Anselm Hager, H. Hilbig, Sascha Riaz · 2023 · Comparative Political Studies · 5 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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  19. Native Internal Migration and the Labor Market Impact of Immigration

    G. Borjas, B. Chiswick · 2019 · Foundations of Migration Economics · 2 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.

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  21. Geographic differences in the effect of immigration on the native wage distribution: Evidence from Italian provinces

    S. Fusaro, Enrique López-Bazo · 2024 · Journal of Regional Science · 1 citations

    This paper examines geographic differences in the effect of immigration on the wage distribution of native Italian workers. The results suggest an insignificant effect across the wage distribution in northern provinces, but large and significant effects in the lower and middle parts of the distribution in the south. This is entirely because immigration pushed up wages at the lower end of the female wage distribution in southern local areas. This result is consistent with increases in labor market participation of native women that went hand in hand with improvements of women's skills at the bottom of the wage distribution.

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  22. Immigration, Labor Shortages, and Labor Market Dynamics

    Federico S. Mandelman, Yang Yu, F. Zanetti · 2026 · CESifo Working Papers

    Immigration has become a central driver of U.S. labor force growth. We document new empirical findings that shed light on the relationships between immigration, labor shortages, wage growth, and job openings during the high-immigration period of 2021-2024. The textbook search-and-matching model implies highly counterfactual labor market dynamics: it predicts that a surge in immigration lowers hiring costs and stimulates vacancy posting, leaving labor market tightness and wages largely unchanged. This prediction contradicts the data, which shows a negative correlation between immigration and vacancy growth. To reconcile the evidence, we extend the framework to incorporate complementarities be

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  23. International immigration and its effects on native labor market: evidence from OECD countries

    R. Mohammad, Iman, Shujaa Waqar, et al. · 2025 · Frontiers in Human Dynamics

    This study aims to investigate the impact of international immigration on the native labor market of host countries. With the growing number of cross-border movements, the relationship between immigration and unemployment in the domestic labor market has become a concern for economists and policy makers. This study utilizes the comprehensive dataset of the years spanning from 2000 to 2020 and employs panel regression analysis to analyze the intricate dynamics of international migration and unemployment of native-born workers of 16 selected OECD countries. The results have disclosed a significant negative relationship between net migration rate and unemployment rate of domestic laborers. Furt

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  24. Impacts of Forced Immigration: The Venezuelan Diaspora and the Brazilian Labor Market

    Rafael Alfena Zago · 2024 · The International Trade Journal

    ABSTRACT This article estimates the impact of immigrant influxes on local labor markets, taking advantage of a natural experiment generated by a massive wave of forced migration of Venezuelans to Roraima, a state in northern Brazil, from 2016 onward. Estimates show that a 1% increase in the share of migrants in the state population due to immigration resulted in 1.1% higher earnings for native workers in the formal sector, 0.3% fewer hours worked weekly, and 2.3% higher wages. Results are confirmed by employing a synthetic control method.

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