The common belief that more immigrant workers depress native workers’ wages or employment is not a good representation of what happens

See New Evidence on Immigrants and Jobs: A large influx of Cubans to Miami did not depress the wages or employment of low-skill American workers by Giovanni Peri And Vasil Yasenov in the WSJ. Mr. Peri is chairman of the economics department at the University of California, Davis, where Mr. Yasenov is a Ph.D. candidate. Excerpt:

"We have reanalyzed the Mariel episode using the largest and most representative annual sample of high-school dropouts from the May/ORG Current Population Survey. It includes 44 cities among which a recently developed statistical methodology allows the researcher to identify those whose labor markets behaved as closely as possible to Miami’s between 1972 and 1979. We then compared the average wages and employment rates of low-skill workers in Miami with such a control group after 1979.

Our results—released as National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 21801 on Dec. 15—confirm Mr. Card’s original study. There is no evidence that Miami’s low-skill workers experienced wage or employment decline relative to those in our control group of cities in 1980, 1981 or 1982. We also analyzed different subgroups—males, females, Hispanics and non-Hispanics—and did not find any significant wage effect in Miami after 1979.

This result suggests that the common belief that more immigrant workers depress native workers’ wages or employment is not a good representation of what happens. Earlier research by one of us has shown that native workers do not suffer the negative impact of arriving immigrants because they take different jobs. Moreover, their arrival stimulates productivity and growth in the economy.

Miami’s experience after the Mariel boatlift suggests that an influx of refugees from Syria to the U.S. would have no significant economic impact on American workers."