An Immigrant Won't Steal Your Raise

Immigration is one of the most contentious topics in American politics. It’s also a case study in how empirical economics is coming to dominate public policy debates. Instead of theories about how immigration should affect labor markets, people are turning to the evidence. And the most powerful evidence we have comes in the form of quasi-experimental studies.

The most important and widely cited such study is a 1990 paper by economist David Card of the University of California-Berkeley. Card studied the impact of the Mariel boatlift, in which Fidel Castro suddenly sent thousands of immigrants to the U.S. in 1980. Most of those immigrants stayed in the Miami area. Standard Econ 101 theory says that a big increase in labor supply should reduce wages for local workers, especially for those who are in direct competition with immigrants. Since most of the Cubans who came in 1980 had little education, we would expect low-skilled Miamians to suffer the biggest wage drops from the labor shock. We might also expect the Mariel boatlift to raise unemployment levels, especially for less-educated Miamians.
QuickTake Skilled Immigrants