New insights into the labour market effects of international migration : a critical overview of available findings

Abstract

"The article deals with the question of whether immigration leads to decreasing wages and increasing unemployment. From a theoretical point of view this is not necessarily true: if capital stock and the goods markets in open economies are adjusted, migration can also have a neutral effect on the labour markets. And indeed, traditional empirical literature does identify only very minor wage and employment effects stemming from migration. However, with reference to this finding, the criticism has been raised that these results are distorted by the self-selection of migrants in prosperous regions. More recent empirical approaches therefore use the variance of the share of foreigner nationals over qualification and work-experience groups to determine labour market effects. But even most of these studies can only identify minimal impact. In the long term, immigration has a neutral effect on the macroeconomic wage level and the unemployment rate only rises marginally. Having said that, the effects on individual groups are very varied: while local employees are on the winning side, foreign nationals who already live in the country lose out considerably." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))

Cite article

Brücker, H. (2010): Neue Erkenntnisse zu den Arbeitsmarktwirkungen internationaler Migration. Ein kritischer Überblick über vorliegende Befunde. In: WSI-Mitteilungen, Vol. 63, No. 10, p. 499-507. DOI:10.5771/0342-300X-2010-10-499