Good migrations: foreign labor, native wages.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: National Bureau of Economic Research - Brief Article

ACCORDING TO LOU Dobbs and other self-proclaimed defenders of the nation's borders, hordes of immigrants are depressing American wages. But a recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research questions the conventional wisdom that competition from immigrants invariably hurts native workers.

Two economists, Giovanni Peri of the University of California at Los Angeles and Gianmarco Ottaviano of the University of Bologna, compared the growth in the percentage of immigrant workers with the change in the average wages of native-born workers in the 86 largest U.S. metropolitan areas between 1970 and 2000. They found overall immigration actually is associated with higher wages for U.S.-born workers. The higher the percentage of immigrants in a city, the higher the average real wages for native-born workers rose.

The economists also looked at what happened to average wages in cities with particularly high and particularly low immigration flows. They found that for every 2 percent increase in foreign-born...