Ithaca Journal, March 16, 2011, Wednesday

Ithaca Journal

March 16, 2011, Wednesday

Ithaca Journal

Don't blame immigrants for taking most jobs, Berkeley economist tells Cornell audience
Immigrants mostly at top and bottom of skill levels, Cal's David Card tells ILR

World-renowned economist David Card, visiting from the University of California, Berkeley, brought a message to Cornell University this week that immigrants seldom compete with the middle class of American workers.

Card gave a talk on immigration Tuesday at Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations. An expert on immigration, Card has found that immigration in the United States has no impact on wages, and that negative attitudes toward immigration are driven by social rather than economic concerns.

The United States tends to attract immigrants from the very top and the very bottom skill levels, as these two groups have the most to gain from immigrating and fill the holes in supply left by native-born Americans, he said.

"If you're kind of a middle, average American worker, the actual degree of immigrant competition you face is much lower than for anyone else," Card said.

Economists do not view immigrants in terms of competition anyway, but rather as increased labor supply, and in theory, the supply of jobs adjusts accordingly with the supply of workers, since an enlarged labor force raises the productivity of capital, leads firms to invest more and in turn creates more jobs, Card explained.

Research has shown over and over again that immigration does not alter wages, he said. For example, Card's study on the Mariel Boatlift, which in 1980 added 75,000 very low-skill Cuban workers to Miami almost overnight, showed that nothing happened to the wages and employment rates of low-skilled native workers.

Card said ambivalence toward immigration may instead come from concerns about social composition.

"Immigration doesn't just change the labor market. It also changes the neighborhood and the workplace and people that your daughter's going to marry," Card said.

A survey Card conducted as a part of the European Social Survey supported his theory that views about immigration policy are mainly driven by social-compositional concerns.

Maria Cook, Cornell professor of international and comparative labor, who attended the talk, said that she would like to see the survey applied to the U.S. context. "I wonder whether you would get the same kind of responses or whether ... the perception of economic impact has had a greater effect in the U.S.," Cook said.

Francine Blau, Cornell professor of industrial and labor relations and labor economics, said that Card's work has heavily impacted mainstream economic thought on immigration, "but like all things in economics, there is probably some debate."