Mariel Boatlift

• Mariel boatlift (Wikipedia)

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• Discussions in Borjas

• Video for David Card

  • [VOD] Interview with David Card: Immigration on wage & minimum wage (~2'30'')
  • [VOD] Prof. David Card - Labor Market Impacts of Immigration : Prof. David Card came to Lausanne on 27.05.16 and presented the current state of academic knowledge on the topic of the economical effect of immigration of the labour market, a  subject that is part of labor economics, his domain of expertise.

• **Mixing the Melting Pot: The Impact of Immigration on Labor Markets (FRB St. Louis, 2017 By  Guillaume Vandenbroucke ,  Heting Zhu)**

  • [Conclusion]

    There have been many studies of the economic consequences of immigration, and they do not all agree.

    Findings are sometimes specific to the experiment at hand, as in the Mariel boatlift case, where it could be argued that the Miami labor market is not representative of the U.S. as a whole.

    Yet, it remains that many studies find little to no evidence of a connection between immigration and labor market outcomes.

    Since this may be more surprising, on the surface, than the opposite result, it deserves some explanations.

    • One possible explanation is that some immigrants may have overall positive effects on the economy. This would be especially true of high-skilled immigrants who contribute ideas and innovations that drive productivity higher.
    • Another explanation is that, even in the same skill group, immigrants and native workers may not be perfect substitutes. It was suggested in one study that immigrants do not so much compete directly with natives as they create conditions for increased specialization by which natives perform more communication-intensive work and immigrants do manual tasks.

• Borjas, G. J. (2017). The Wage Impact of the Marielitos: A Reappraisal. ILR Review, 70(5), 1077–1110.

  This article brings a new perspective to the analysis of the wage effects of the Mariel boatlift crisis, in which an estimated 125,000 Cuban refugees migrated to Florida between April and October, 1980. The author revisits the question of wage impacts from such a supply shock, drawing on the cumulative insights of research on the economic impact of immigration. That literature shows that the wage impact must be measured by carefully matching the skills of the immigrants with those of the incumbent workforce. Given that at least 60% of the Marielitos were high school dropouts, this article specifically examines the wage impact for this low-skill group. This analysis overturns the prior finding that the Mariel boatlift did not affect Miami’s wage structure. The wage of high school dropouts in Miami dropped dramatically, by 10 to 30%, suggesting an elasticity of wages with respect to the number of workers between −0.5 and −1.5.

  • Figure 4-12. The Wage Impact of the Mariel Boatlift

• Peri, G., & Yasenov, V. (2019). The Labor Market Effects of a Refugee Wave: Synthetic Control Method Meets the Mariel Boatlift. Journal of Human Resources, 54(2), 267–309. https://doi.org/10.3368/jhr.54.2.0217.8561R1

  We apply the synthetic control method to reexamine the labor market effects of the Mariel Boatlift, first studied by David Card (1990). This method improves on previous studies by choosing a control group of cities that best matches Miami’s labor market trends pre-Boatlift and providing more reliable inference. Using a sample of non-Cuban high school dropouts we find no significant difference in the wages of workers in Miami relative to its control after 1980. We also show that by focusing on small subsamples and matching the control group on a short pre-1979 series, as done in Borjas (2017), one can find large wage differences between Miami and the control because of large measurement error.

Monopsony and migrant workers in the United ARAB EMIRATES (Borjas T@W)