Undocumented workers receiving workers compensation benefits

Gregory Presmanes and Seth Eisenberg article, 'Hazardous Condition: The Status of Illegal Immigrants and Their Entitlement to Worker's Compensation Benefits', review state worker's compensation laws across the country. They find that many states have adjudicated the issues and have generally found that illegal immigrants have a general entitlement to worker's compensation benefits.

According to the article, CA, CO, CT, FL, KS, LA, NJ, NC, OK, OR, PA, and TX have all recognized the general rights of illegal aliens to receivig worker's compensation benefits.

Katrina evacuees lower native worker wages

Hot Research Friday.

Molly Fifer McIntosh article 'Measuring the Labor Market Impacts of Hurricane Katrina Migration", finds that Hurricane Katrina migration depressed wages of native Houstonians 1.8%. Her work also found that the evacuees lower the probability of a Houston native being employed by 0.5 percentage.

In short, there are significant albeit modest, labor market effects associated with the Hurricane Katrina evacuees migration to Houston.

Immigrant Latino workers hit hard but still working

The Pew Hispanic Center (on 6/4/2008) released Latino Labor Report, 2008: Construction Reverses Job Growth for Latinos. Using data through the first quarter of 2008, the report finds the economic downturn having a disproportionate impact on Hispanic workers. especially Mexican immigrants and recent arrivals, have been hurt the most by the slump in the construction industry.

There are no signs Latino immigrants are leaving the U.S. labor market but they now play a smaller role in the growth of the Hispanic workforce than in recent years.

The report is available at the Pew Hispanic Center's website, http://www.pewhispanic.org/.

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: