Is the New Immigration Really so Bad?

By David Card. Social Science Research Network, 2005

1,100 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper reviews the recent evidence on U.S. immigration, focusing on two key questions: (1) Does immigration reduce the labor market opportunities of less-skilled natives? (2) Have immigrants who arrived after the 1965 Immigration Reform Act successfully assimilated? Looking across major cities, differential immigrant inflows are strongly correlated with the relative supply of high school dropouts. Nevertheless, data from the 2000 Census shows that relative wages of native dropouts are uncorrelated with the relative supply of less-educated workers, as they were in earlier years. At the aggregate level, the wage gap between dropouts and high school graduates has remained nearly constant since 1980, despite supply pressure from immigration and the rise of other education-related wage gaps. Overall, evidence that immigrants have harmed the opportunities of less educated natives is scant. On the question of assimilation, the success of the U.S.-born children of immigrants is a key yardstick. By this metric, post-1965 immigrants are doing reasonably well: second generation sons and daughters have higher education and wages than the children of natives. Even children of the least educated immigrant origin groups have closed most of the education gap with the children of natives.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/33ce47dd88b55edbb4cc35fe3ecc957e93e9093f

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Citations in the corpus

Crime and Immigration: Evidence from Large Immigrant Waves (2013, neutral): “We begin by describing the evolution of immigration in the UK over the last few decades, paying particular attention to the large flows since 1997.”
IMMIGRATION AND WAGES: EVIDENCE FROM CONSTRUCTION * (2012, neutral): “The expression also shows that the native wage adjustment is less responsive to immigration when immigrants and natives are imperfect substitutes, a result highlighted in recent contributions by Card (2009), Manacorda et al.”
Cultural Diversity and Local Labour Markets (2014, background): “The first is the ‘shift–share’ instrument popularized by C ard ( 2005 , 2007 ).”
Do Immigrants Cause Crime (2012, background): “devoted much attention to the first issue (Borjas, 1994; Friedberg and Hunt, 1995; Bauer and Zimmermann, 2002; Card, 2005) the second one has remained largely unexplored.”
Economic Impacts of Immigration: A Survey (2011, background): “Card (2005) found that children of immigrants assimilated reasonably well into the US labor market.”
South-South Migration: The Impact of Nicaraguan Immigrants on Earnings, Inequality and Poverty in Costa Rica (2009, neutral): “As far as we know, 2 Some widely-quoted recent studies include Ottaviano and Peri (2005), Card (2005) and Borjas (2003).”
The unemployment impact of immigration in OECD countries (2011, background): “The relevance of such immigration-induced movements by natives, already emphasised by Borjas et al. (1997), has been disputed in the recent literature (see in particular Borjas, 2005, and Card, 2005).”
High-Tech Immigrant Entrepreneurship in the United States (2011, background): “Do the foreign-born exploit opportunities that, in their absence, native-born entrepreneurs would have recognized and exploited, or are these opportunities generated by their presence? The evidence in other areas of immigration is ambiguous (Card 2005, Fairlie and Meyer 2003, Light and Rosenstein 19”
Cultural Diversity and Plant‐Level Productivity (2015, background): “This strategy is frequently used in studies that focus on the aggregate level impacts of diversity only (Card 2005, Ottaviano and Peri 2005, 2006).”
The rise of offshoring: it's not wine for cloth anymore (2006, background): “25The evidence seems to suggest that changes in the relative factor supply have no substantial impact on wages, as Card (1990, 2005), Hunt (1992), and Friedberg (2001), among others, have argued.”