Many workers with low levels of educational attainment immigrated to the United States in recent decades. Large inflows of less educated immigrants would reduce wages paid to comparably-educated native-born workers if the two groups are perfectly substitutable in production. In a simple model...

The revival of international migration in the last fifteen years has spurred economists to more systematically study their determinants and consequences. This contribution expands the existing literature in two directions. First we focus on the European Union as a whole and compare it to the US...

Recent influential empirical work has emphasized the negative impact immigrants have on the wages of U.S.-born workers, arguing that immigration harms less educated American workers in particular and all U.S.-born workers in general. Because U.S. and foreign born workers belong to different...

As of 2004 California employed almost 30% of all foreign born workers in the U.S. and was the state with the largest percentage of immigrants in the labor force. It also received a very large number of Mexican and uneducated immigrants during the recent decades. If immigration harms the labor...

In this paper we analyze the impact of immigrants on the type and quantity of native jobs. We use data on fifteen Western European countries during the 1996-2010 period. We find that immigrants, by taking manual-routine type of occupations pushed natives towards more complex (abstract and...

A series of recent influential papers has emphasized that in order to identify the wage effects of immigration one needs to consider national effects by skill level. The criticism to the so called „area approach“ is based on the fact that native workers are mobile and would eliminate, in the...

Many workers with low levels of educational attainment immigrated to the United States in recent decades. In a simple model exploiting comparative advantage we show that if less-educated foreign and native-born workers specialize in performing different tasks, immigration will cause natives to...

In this paper we analyze the effect of immigrants on natives’ job specialization in Western Europe. We test whether the inflow of immigrants changes employment rates or the chosen occupation of natives with similar education and age. We find no evidence of the first and strong evidence of the...