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Title: Native Competition and Low-Skilled Immigrant Inflows

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2010

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Abstract: This paper demonstrates that immigration flows respond to differences in labor market conditions by documenting the systematic change in newly arriving low-skilled immigrants location choices in response to exogenous supply increases among the US- born. In contrast to previous treatments of this question, this paper relies on an identifiable source of exogenous variation that alters the expected returns to entering a labor market. Using pre-reform welfare participation rates as an instrument for changes in native labor supply, I find that immigrant inflows shifted away from cities with more welfare leavers toward cities with smaller reform-induced supply shifts. The empirical methods I use improve upon previous immigrant location studies by explicitly allowing for unobserved city amenities that provide different values based on the immigrants source country. The extent of the selection uncovered is substantial: for each additional native woman working in a city as a result of welfare reform, 0.8 fewer female immigrants choose to live and work there. These results provide direct evidence that selective location choices among immigrants tend to equilibrate labor market returns across geography.

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Authors: Cadena, Brian C.

Publisher: University of Colorado-Boulder

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Migration and Immigration, Poverty and Welfare

Countries: United States