Labor Market Flooding? Migrant Destination and Wage Change during America’s Age of Mass Migration

Influential voices in the media and in public policy circles have sustained the impression and perhaps heightened the concern that high levels of immigration harm resident Americans by reducing their wages. This perception of “labor market flooding ” – sometimes billed as “common sense ” (Brimelow 1995) – is bolstered by the logic of introductory-level microeconomic theory. That analysis begins by assuming a downward-sloping demand curve for labor in a static labor market. Under such circumstances, an immigration-induced outward shift in the labor supply curve will cause the equilibrium wage to fall. George Borjas emphasized this logic in the title of a recent paper, “The Labor Demand Curve is Downward Sloping ” (Borjas 2003). Nonetheless, an impressive number of empirical studies based on recent data find no evidence of a negative impact of immigration on resident wages. At the conclusion of a survey of the literature published in 1995, Rachel M. Friedberg and �ennifer Hunt report