The Impact of Immigrants on Local Native Wages Across Industries and Prefectures in Japan 2014-2018

Using data on native earnings and immigrant inflows across industry and prefecture from 2014-2018, we find that immigrant inflows have no effect on native wages. We come to this conclusion using a two-stage least squares regression that employs a predicted version of immigrant inflow based on previous migration patterns as an instrumental variable. From our first-stage regression, we find that immigrants do not follow the migration patterns of previous immigrants from the same source country. Using data on the migration outflows of natives from the same period, we also find that prefectural mobility rates of natives are insensitive to immigrant inflows