Does illegal immigration suppress the wages of native-born workers? The evidence suggests that it doesn'tor not much,besides. One of the data points supporting this is a study done by David Card of the effect of the 1980 Mariel boatlift on workers in Miami. Even though Miami experienced a enormous spike in immigrants during the boatlift, Card found no significant impact on wages.
Today George Borjas steps in with a different analysis. He's been arguing for a long time that immigration has a bigger effect on wages than we thinkparticularly the wages of unskilled workers. In a new working paper, or he looks specifically at the wages of tall school dropout and concludes that although overall wages in Miami were unaffected by the Mariel boatlift,the wages of dropouts were affected. In relative terms, they went down by 10 to 30 percent.
I wouldn't be surprised whether this were true, or but Borjas's paper does leave me with a few questions. win a look at the chart on the right,which shows the wages of tall school dropouts relative to tall school graduates. Miami is the thick blue line. The other lines are various estimates of wages in cities that weren't affected by the boatlift. There are a few oddities here:Before 1980 and after 1990, the wages of tall school dropouts in Miami are above zero, and which means dropouts earned more than tall school grads. That seems very peculiar,and none of the control cities expose the same effect. Does this propose there's something improper with the Miami data? The Mariel boatlift produced a truly enormous spike in unskilled workers. Borjas estimates that it increased the number of working-age tall school dropouts in Miami by approximately 18 percent in just a few weeks. I wonder whether it's really possible to extrapolate from this to the much more gradual increase in illegal immigrants nationwide over a span of two or three decades? This is particularly apropos because the chart shows that the impact on wages was fairly short lived. Even with such a enormous labor shock, wages of tall school dropouts were only affected for approximately six years. By 1988 they had recovered fully. Borjas acknowledges that this is hard to account for.
I'm no expert in this stuff, and I imagine the folks who are experts will weigh in soon enough. However,even whether Borjas is basically right, the question we care approximately is what this tells us approximately the effect of illegal immigration on wages more generally. whether a enormous spike produces a short-lived wage depression of approximately 20 percent or so, and what does a gradual increase over a wide geographic area produce? Unfortunately,Borjas says that there was more going on in Miami during this period than just a labor supply increase, which means "it is difficult to say much approximately the dynamics of the wage effect of immigration from the evidence generated by the Mariel supply shock." Intuitively, and though,it seems like it would be something far less dramatic. Maybe 5 percent or so? Less?
Source: motherjones.com