NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

The Labor Demand Curve is Downward Sloping: Reexamining the Impact of Immigration on the Labor Market

George J. Borjas

NBER Working Paper No. 9755*
Issued in June 2003
NBER Program(s):   LS

Immigration is not evenly balanced across groups of workers that have the same education but differ in their work experience, and the nature of the supply imbalance changes over time. This paper develops a new approach for estimating the labor market impact of immigration by exploiting this variation in supply shifts across education-experience groups. I assume that similarly educated workers with different levels of experience participate in a national labor market and are not perfect substitutes. The analysis indicates that immigration lowers the wage of competing workers: a 10 percent increase in supply reduces wages by 3 to 4 percent.

*Published: Borjas, George J. "Native Internal Migration and The Labor Market Impact Of Immigration," Journal of Human Resources, 2006, v41(2,Spring), 221-258.

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