Quote:
Originally Posted by Subfallen
Immigrants have a hugely disproportionate negative effect on the wages of low-skilled workers as compared to the general work force.
I'm not really sure what you mean by "disproportionate" in this context but the empirical evidence I've seen does not support this claim. The studies I've seen that investigated impacts within specific occupations or for low-skill workers in general tend to find small negative effects on the wages of native workers in occupations impacted by immigration directly, but larger positive effects on wages for other native workers, and so an average positive effect of immigration overall.
So, for example
(Card, 2001) finds a 1-3% decline in native wages in impacted occupations from immigration in cities like LA and Miami during the 1980s. (
Borjas, 2003) finds a 3-4% decrease in native wages in impacted occupations for each 10% increase in immigrant workers within that occupation. I don't think I'd describe these results as "disproportionate", although they are not meaningless. Other studies, some in other countries, have failed to find significant impacts (cf. the discussion
here, in the section "International empirical evidence").
It also appears that the small negative impact of immigration on low-skilled labor is dwarfed by other forces causing wages for those workers to decline.
(Peri, 2007) is a study of immigration in California from 1990-2004. If you look at Figure 3, it shows the net change in wages (in 2000 dollars) among different income groups, both for California and nationally. The change for high school dropouts is quite large (-15% nationally), but the point they make is that the net change in this group is not that much larger in California (-17.8%) than nationally, despite the enormous influx of immigration into California over that time period. They conclude:
Quote:
If U.S. States were independent countries, California would be the second largest receiving country for international migrants in the whole world (after Russia) with its 8.5 million foreign-born as of 2004. Moreover, its proximity to Mexico and a porous border generated extremely large flows of uneducated Mexican workers (documented and undocumented), at a growing rate, during the last three decades. With one third of its total labor force made up by immigrants, two thirds of its uneducated workers coming from abroad and a rapidly rising foreign-born population, that grew by 40% in the last 14 years, surely native Californians (particularly the unskilled ones) must have suffered the most from the negative effects of this ”immigration crisis” on their employment opportunities and wages.
The present study, that analyzes employment and wage data in California over the 1960-2004 period, seems to say otherwise. On one hand, immigrants do not seem to increase the tendency of natives with similar skills (education and experience) to migrate, or to otherwise change their likelihood of losing their jobs and dropping out of employment. On the other hand, the impact of immigration over the 1990-2004 period has been negative on the wages of previous immigrants and positive on the wages of U.S. natives, revealing a good degree of complementarity between U.S. and foreign-born workers that benefits (rather then harms) native workers’ productivity.
They go on to argue that the reason why new immigration is harming prior immigrants' wages over native-born workers is simply because labor markets in California are already nearly completely segregated, i.e the work being done by immigrant labor has not been done by native workers in a long time, so net changes in immigration have little effect on native workers.
What all this suggests to me is that this idea that we can fix the economy for poorer or less skilled laborers through a nationalist anti-immigration policy is pretty misguided.
Last edited by well named; 05-04-2017 at 01:44 PM.
Reason: confused George Borjas for Jorge Luis Borges :P