Robots and migrants: Research shows no evidence for the claim that immigration drags down local incomes or holds back innovation

Labor markets have recently turned into a battleground for political rhetoric. Donald Trump warns Americans that migrants are “stealing their jobs.” His vice president, J.D. Vance, insists that an abundance of cheap labor is slowing down technological innovation. Trump’s point is a classic — but outdated. Not only experts, but even the general U.S. population (64%), no longer believes it, understanding instead that newcomers tend to fill jobs that locals often avoid due to low pay, hard working conditions, or a lack of prestige. In Russia, however, the myth of migration as a threat to the labor market remains strong: 44% of respondents believe migrants are taking jobs away from locals, while only 37% disagree.

Over the past few decades, there has been a large number of studies across dozens of countries aimed at measuring the impact of mass migration on local populations — both on society as a whole and on groups whose skills and qualifications are closest to those of migrants. When it comes to the general population, there has never really been a debate among economists: migration makes countries richer, and average living standards rise. The controversy, for a time, centered on specific groups of locals — typically low-skilled workers. In 1990, economist David Card published a landmark study analyzing the consequences of the so-called Mariel boatlift — the mass exodus of Cubans to Miami in 1980 that followed Fidel Castro’s sudden announcement that anyone wishing to leave the island could do so through the port of Mariel. About 125,000 Cubans, most with little formal education, crossed to the United States by boat, swelling Miami’s labor force by 7% almost overnight. Card compared the evolution of wages and employment among Miami’s native workers before and after the migrants’ arrival with trends in four similar U.S. cities — Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, and Tampa. He found no evidence of declining wages or a rise in unemployment — and the positive trends held not only for Miami’s population as a whole, but even among earlier waves of Cuban migrants whose skills and background were expected to be hit the hardest by the sudden surge in competition.

In 2017, Harvard economist George Borjas attempted to challenge Card’s findings. Expanding the sample to include more cities, he focused narrowly on non-Hispanic men who had dropped out of high school — arguing that they were the group most directly exposed to competition from Cuban migrants. For this sampling segment, Borjas claimed, local incomes fell sharply. But in 2018, economists Giovanni Peri and Vasil Yasenov revisited the data. They widened the sample to include Hispanic high-school dropouts (who by education and background shared a demographic profile that was much closer to that of the arriving migrants) and also women, whom Borjas had inexplicably excluded. Their recalculation refuted Borjas and upheld Card’s original conclusion: there was no decline in wages or employment, even among these more economically vulnerable groups.

Other studies have reached similar conclusions. Economists have analyzed, for example, the repatriation of Algerians of European descent to France after Algeria’s independence in 1962, the mass immigration from the Soviet Union to Israel after exit restrictions were lifted in 1990 (which increased Israel’s population by 12% in just four years), the surge of European migration to the United States between the 1910s and 1930s, and long-term research on the effects of contemporary migration to Denmark. In all these cases, researchers found no significant negative impact on local populations. In fact, in the case of European migration to the U.S., employment among locals actually rose.

By now, a broad consensus has emerged among economists. In 2017, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences convened all the leading experts on migration — both advocates and skeptics, including none other than George Borjas. The resulting report delivered a clear conclusion: “The empirical research of recent decades indicates that, when measured over a period longer than 10 years, the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers is very small.”

So why don’t local incomes fall when the supply of labor rises? Economists Giovanni Peri and Chad Sparber maintain that the reason lies in the way migration deepens the division of labor. Migrants typically take on more physically demanding jobs — in construction, cleaning, harvesting — while locals move into roles that require language proficiency and communication skills, such as management, administration, or sales. And since these communication-heavy jobs tend to pay more, the earnings of locals actually rise.

The positive effect is particularly striking for women. As World Bank analysts note, the arrival of low-skilled female migrants enables highly skilled local women to spend more time improving their careers. Locals can delegate household tasks to affordable domestic helpers and focus on their professional lives. In turn, overall prosperity rises thanks to a more efficient allocation of labor.