Source: CENTER FOR IMMIGRATION STUDIES, 1/12/16

The Center for Immigration Studies has published an expanded version of a Real Clear Policy article analyzing the debate over immigration's impact on wages.

The most frequently cited evidence that an increase in the labor supply does not lower wages comes from UC Berkeley economist David Card's study of the Mariel boatlift – when 125,000 Cubans arrived in Miami in a matter of months during the summer of 1980. Card famously found no wage impact of the boatlift on Miami workers, and his study has been frequently cited by supporters of increased immigration.

Card's findings were challenged recently by Harvard economist George Borjas, who reanalyzed the effects of the boatlift and found a wage drop of almost 40 percent below the trend in comparison cities. Borjas's re-analysis was, in turn, disputed by UC Davis economists Giovanni Peri and Vasil Yasenov; Borjas's response to them was published this week.

To make sense of this ongoing dispute – one with important implications for future policy – Jason Richwine, a public policy analyst and National Review contributor, evaluates the many variables at play and the uncertainties surrounding the competing methodologies. "[A] major takeaway from these papers," he writes, "is that the boatlift is not nearly as useful a case study as some people have made it out to be."

Richwine's conclusion: "In the end, the data may be too limited to reach a strong consensus about the wage impact of the boatlift. It is clear, however, that to continue claiming the effect was definitively nil … is to go well beyond what the data can support."

View the entire article at: http://cis.org/Richwine-wages-Mariel