The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market

By David Card. 1990

Using data from the Current Population Survey, this paper describes the effect of the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 on the Miami labor market. The Mariel immigrants increased the Miami labor force by 7%, and the percentage increase in labor supply to less-skilled occupations and industries was even greater because most of the immigrants were relatively unskilled. Nevertheless, the Mariel influx appears to have had virtually no effect on the wages or unemployment rates of less-skilled workers, even among Cubans who had immigrated earlier. The author suggests that the ability of Miami's labor market to rapidly absorb the Mariel immigrants was largely owing to its adjustment to other large waves of immigrants in the two decades before the Mariel Boatlift.

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Citations in the corpus

Synthetic Control Methods for Comparative Case Studies: Estimating the Effect of California’s Tobacco Control Program (2010, methodology): “Card (1990) studies the impact of the 1980 Mariel Boatlift, a large and sudden Cuban migratory influx in Miami, using other cities in the southern United States as a comparison group.”
The Impact of the Recent Migration from Eastern Europe on the UK Economy (2007, unknown): “Card (1990) found that wages and employment opportunities for Miami's population were hardly impacted at all by the boatlift.”
Big Data Investment, Skills, and Firm Value (2014, unknown): “…prior IT adoption research (e.g. Forman 2005), but provides some within-firm variation in how the labor pool impacts IT returns, and much of the economics literature treats the metropolitan region as the appropriate observational unit for labor market analysis (e.g., Card 1990; Borjas et al. 1996).”
Labor Supply Shocks, Native Wages, and the Adjustment of Local Employment (2017, background): “Card (1990, 2001, 2007), Altonji and Card (1991), Dustmann, Fabbri, and Preston (2005), Boustan, Fishback, and Kantor (2010), Wagner (2010), andGlitz (2012) investigate wage and employment responses, but not how these responses interact with each other.”
Effects of Immigrant Legalization on Crime: The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (2014, unknown): “[12] Card, David.”
The Impact of Mass Migration on the Israeli Labor Market (2001, background): “Finally, studies of natural experiments analyze migrations induced by political factors in the sending country (Card, 1990; Hunt, 1992; Carrington and DeLima, 1996).”
The Impact of Immigration on the British Labour Market (2005, background): “Card (1990; 2001) and this Feature, and LaLonde and Topel (1991).”
The Labor Market Impact of Immigration: A Quasi-Experiment Exploiting Immigrant Location Rules in Germany (2012, methodology): “The only two examples in the literature that make use of such an experiment to identify the labor market impact of immigration are the Mariel boatlift analyzed by Card (1990) and the immigration flows as a result of Hurricane Mitch analyzed by Kugler and Yuksel (2008).3 The main conceptual differenc”
Rural-Urban Migration in Developing Countries: Lessons from the Literature (2021, background): “We start with a famous study focusing on the labor market impacts of a natural experiment resulting from the massive arrival of Cuban refugees in Florida (Card, 1990). This study found no impact on the unemployment rate and wages of low-skilled workers. Although the influx of Cuban refugees created ”
The Impact of Weather Anomalies on Migration in sub-Saharan Africa (2012, background): “One of the difficulties is to find a valid instrumental variable that will not affect the net migration rate through 13Among others, Card (1990), Friedberg and Hunt (1995), Hunt (1992) as well as Ottaviano and Peri (2011) cannot find empirical evidence supporting this causal link.”
The Analysis of Household Surveys (Reissue Edition with a New Preface): A Microeconometric Approach to Development Policy (2018, background): “Card (1989) shows that the Mariel boatlift, where political events in Cuba led to the arrival of 125,000 Cubans in Miami between May and September 1980, had little apparent effect on wages in Miami, for either Cubans or nonCubans.”