Do undocumented workers push out native born workers?: New Research

George Borjas, Jeffrey Grogger, and Gordon Hanson have a new paper, that attempts to debunk the finding of recent research by Ottaviano and Peri (2007). Ottaviano and Peri find that immigration can cause native wages to increase (not decrease) due to strong complementarities between native and immigrant labor.

Borjas, Grogger, and Hanson argue that the Ottaviano and Peri results are fragile. Their work suggests that dropping out one section of the data causes the Ottavian and Peri finds to disappear,

The Ottaviano and Peri data includes currently enrolled high school juniors and seniors. They classify these high school juniors and seniors as part of the "high school dropout" workforce. Their finding of immigrant-native complementarity disappears if the analysis excludes these high school juniors and seniors.Things that seem too good to be true usually aren’t.


Immigrant-Native Complementarity Revisited, by George Borjas: Here’s the abstract to the new paper: