Impact of Low-Skill Immigrants On Low-Skill Blacks
By Bruce Kesler from the website Democracy-project.com
Sphere: Related ContentAmong those who do not benefit from the immigration of those with low-skills, mostly from Mexico and Central America, are low-skill Blacks.
The May 2007 NBER Digest from the National Bureau of Economic Research summarizes the research:
“Remarkably, as far as we know, no study has examined if there is a link between the resurgence of large-scale immigration and the employment and incarceration trends in the black population,” co-authors George Borjas, Jeffrey Grogger, and Gordon Hanson write in Immigration and African-American Employment Opportunities: The Response of Wages, Employment, and Incarceration to Labor Supply Shocks (NBER Working Paper No.12518). The authors are careful to point out that even without increased immigration, most of the fall in employment and increase in jailed black men would have happened anyway. Nevertheless, the racially disproportionate effects of immigration on employment are striking….The observed correlations suggest that immigration is an important underlying factor influencing the observed trends. In particular, their analysis finds that a 10 percent rise in immigrants in a particular skill group significantly trimmed the wages of black and white men alike. For African-Americans, the decline was 3.6 percent. For whites, it was actually slightly higher: 3.8 percent. Beyond that, however, the black-white experience differed markedly, especially for low-skilled workers. Take employment rates: from 1960 to 2000, black high school dropouts saw their employment rates drop 33 percentage points –– from 88.6 percent to 55.7 percent — the authors found in their analysis of census data from 1960 to 2000. The decrease for white high school dropouts was only roughly half that –– from 94.1 percent to 76.0 percent.
One reason, the authors argue, is that black employment is more sensitive to an immigration influx than white employment….
That same immigration rise was also correlated with a rise in incarceration rates. For white men, a 10 percent rise in immigration appeared to cause a 0.1 percentage point increase in the incarceration rate for white men. But for black men, it meant a nearly 1 percentage-point rise.
Why would a boost in immigration effectively put more men, especially black men, behind bars? The authors put forward a straightforward theory: immigration causes wages and employment to fall for black workers. When this happens, some of those workers –– especially those with the lowest skills — turn to crime to increase their income. …
The authors stress that immigration is only one factor in the worsening labor situation of low-skilled African-American men. “The 1980-2000 immigrant influx, therefore, generally ‘explains’ about 20 to 60 percent of the decline in wages, 25 percent of the decline in employment, and about 10 percent of the rise in incarceration rates among blacks with a high school education or less,” they write.
There’s, obviously, more at play here than immigration’s effect on low-skill Blacks. But, there’s still a considerable impact upon low-skill Blacks. Among the costs of any liberalization in immigration, there should be an accounting of such costs as these imposed upon citizens.
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