Our Town: The Economist’s Report | This American Life

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Our analysis shows that CZ 6100 experienced extraordinary growth in immigrant population between 1990 and 2010, increasing their population share by a factor close to 10. This was very different from the experience of other counties that we take as a control group. The employment and wages of less-educated natives and of natives in the slaughtering sector, however, did not show much difference between CZ 6100 and the control group over the same period. Hence, as documented in the economic literature, there does not seem to be very much evidence of negative wage or employment effects of immigrants on natives. Immigrants not only bring labor but also local demand, and often they work in jobs differentiated from those of natives. Moreover, their presence may attract investment and bring the creation of complementary jobs for native-born workers. The very large increase in immigrants in some counties of Alabama, especially of less-educated workers in the labor market that includes Marshall and DeKalb Counties (CZ 6100), does not seem associated with a comparable depression of native wages or employment. To summarize: After 20 years of immigrant inflows, which increased the immigrant share of less-educated workers from close to 0 percent to 28 percent in the treated market, the weekly wages of high school dropouts grew at a slightly slower pace, while wages in the animal slaughtering sector grew slightly faster. This analysis does not support the idea that less-skilled immigrants have large depressing effects on wages and employment of less-skilled natives. Consistent with the evidence presented in other studies, immigrants may fill some manual jobs in certain industries, creating complementarities and hence gains in productivity and wages in other jobs within those industries, attenuating the potentially competitive effects that would otherwise have depressed wages. Importantly, the effects on native wages are rather small because the direct competition from immigrants can be attenuated by other margins of adjustment, and because the business-creating effect in the industry offsets the competition.
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