The Effect of Low-Skill Immigration Restrictions on US Firms and Workers: Evidence from a Randomized Lottery

Firm survey approved by the Dartmouth College Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects, #STUDY00032360. Pre-analysis plan irreversibly registered the same day at https://osf.io/zdyun. We benefited from interactions with Suresh Naidu, Thomas Chaney, Melanie Morten, Ran Abramitzky, Olivier Blanchard, Dean Yang, Joan Llull, William Collins, Paolo Falco, Chad Sparber, Jeremy Weinstein, Todd Schoellman, Nicolas Morales, Anna Maria Mayda, Joan Monras, Giovanni Peri, Muly San, Parag Mahajan, Sharat Ganapati, Quy-Toan Do, Marta Prato, Britta Glennon, Jonathan Dingel, Nels Lind, Stefano Carattini, Federico Mandelman, Hyunju Lee, Justin Sandefur, and seminar participants at the National Bureau of Economic Research, Stanford University Dept. of Economics, the CESifo Venice Summer Institute, the Vanderbilt University Dept. of Economics, University of Delaware Dept. of Economics, the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, the Bank of Canada Workshop on Macroeconomic Implications of Migration, the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, George Mason University, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and the University of Pittsburgh. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the U.S. Department of Labor provided public data on the certification lottery. The firm survey was distributed by the National Association of Landscape Professionals, the Outdoor Amusement Business Association, the Seasonal Employment Alliance, and the American Seafood Jobs Alliance. We acknowledge support from Open Philanthropy and we thank Reva Resstack for research assistance. Any views expressed herein are those of the authors alone and do not represent any organization. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• October 19, 2022