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Title: Immigration, Offshoring and American Jobs
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2010
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Abstract: How many "American jobs" have U.S.-born workers lost due to immigration and offshoring? Or, alternatively,is it possible that immigration and offshoring, by promoting cost-savings and enhanced efficiency infirms, have spurred the creation of jobs for U.S. natives? We consider a multi-sector version of the Grossmanand Rossi-Hansberg (2008) model with a continuum of tasks in each sector and we augment it to includeimmigrants with heterogeneous productivity in tasks. We use this model to jointly analyze the impact ofa reduction in the costs of offshoring and of the costs of immigrating to the U.S. The model predicts thatwhile cheaper offshoring reduces the share of natives among less skilled workers, cheaper immigration doesnot, but rather reduces the share of offshored jobs instead. Moreover, since both phenomena have a positive"cost-savings" effect they may leave unaffected, or even increase, total native employment of less skilledworkers. Our model also predicts that offshoring will push natives toward jobs that are more intensive incommunication-interactive skills and away from those that are manual and routine intensive. We test thepredictions of the model on data for 58 U.S. manufacturing industries over the period 2000-2007 and findevidence in favor of a positive productivity effect such that immigration has a positive net effect on nativeemployment while offshoring has no effect on it. We also find some evidence that offshoring has pushednatives toward more communication-intensive tasks while it has pushed immigrants away from them.
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Authors: Ottaviano, Gianmarco IP; Peri, Giovanni; Wright, Greg C.
Publisher: Centro Studi Luca dAgliano (LdA)
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Migration and Immigration
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