Chapter 14 Economic impact of international migration and the economic performance of migrants

This chapter describes the numbers and characteristics of international migrants to selected developed countries, explores some of the economic factors motivating international migration, examines the impact of immigration on the receiving country's labor markets, discusses the extent to which immigrants assimilate to the receiving country's labor market, and presents several studies of immigrants' effects on the social welfare system. The chapter focuses on the experiences of Australia, Canada, and the United States. Increased immigration has a modest impact on the distribution of income, and most of these adverse affects fall on immigrants themselves. These effects may be small as a result of the effects that immigrants have on local labor demand or of changes in natives' migration patterns. First, there is evidence of a significant amount of immigrant assimilation in the US data, although there is less evidence of it in Australian, Canadian, and European data. This result implies that the adverse effects that US immigrants have on wages lessen as they spend more time in the United States. Second, this assimilation does not mean that immigrants' wages approach those of the median native.