1 Border Commuting and Native Employment

Citation. Dustmann et al. [2017], "Labor supply shocks, native wages, and the adjustment of local employment," Quarterly Journal of Economics.  

Question. How do native wages and employment respond to an inflow of foreign labour? Identification. Exploits a 1991 agreement that let Czech workers commute to German border municipalities, generating a sharp, policy-driven labour-supply shock that varied with distance to the border a natural experiment immune to immigrants' usual location choice.  

Result. A rise in the immigrant labour share modestly depressed native wages but, more strikingly, reduced native employment in the affected regions, with the adjustment falling on slower local job creation and the displacement of older workers rather than on wages alone.  

Takeaway. The labour market absorbs supply shocks partly through employment and population margins, so wage-only studies understate the adjustment.  

2 The Bracero Exclusion

Citation. Clemens et al. [2018], "Immigration restrictions as active labor market policy: evidence from the Mexican Bracero exclusion," American Economic Review.  

Question. Does excluding foreign workers raise the wages and employment of natives the core promise of restrictionist policy?  

Identification. A difference-in-differences design around the 1964 termination of the Bracero programme, which abruptly removed nearly half a million Mexican seasonal farmworkers, comparing states with high versus low prior reliance on braceros.  

Result. Exclusion produced no detectable increase in native farm wages or employment. Growers adjusted instead by mechanising (e.g., tomato harvesters) and switching to less labour-intensive crops.  

Takeaway. Cutting off migrant labour need not help native workers when employers can substitute capital and technology a direct rebuttal to the lump-of-labour intuition.  

3 A Push Shock from the Peso Crisis

Citation. Monras [2020], "Immigration and wage dynamics: evidence from the Mexican peso crisis," Journal of Political Economy.  

Question. What are the short- and long-run wage effects of a sudden immigration surge, and how does the economy adjust?  

Identification. Uses the 1995 Mexican peso crisis as a push shock that expelled migrants for reasons unrelated to U.S. local demand, instrumenting inflows by pre-existing settlement networks.  

Result. Low-skill native wages fell in high-immigration locations in the short run, but the effect dissipated over time as natives internally migrated away from affected areas, spreading the shock across the national labour market.  

Takeaway. Internal migration is a powerful equilibrating force; local estimates overstate the national wage impact of immigration.  

4 Refugee Dispersal and Occupational Upgrading

Citation. Foged and Peri  [2016], "Immigrants' effect on native workers: new analysis on longitudinal data," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.  

Identification. Exploits Denmark's 1986-1998 policy that dispersed refugees across municipalities in a quasi-random manner, tracking individual natives in longitudinal administrative data.  

Result. Greater low-skilled immigration pushed less-educated native workers out of manual tasks and into more complex, communication-intensive occupations, raising their wages and mobility rather than harming them.  

Takeaway. Immigration can reallocate natives toward jobs that complement, rather than compete with, immigrant labour an upgrading channel invisible in aggregate wage regressions.  

5 Gains and Backlash in the Age of Mass Migration

Citation. Tabellini [2020], "Gifts of the immigrants, woes of the natives: lessons from the age of mass migration," Review of Economic Studies.  

Identification. A shift-share (Bartik) instrument combining pre-period immigrant settlement patterns across U.S. cities with national origin-country inflows, 1910-1930.  

Result. Immigration increased natives' employment and occupational standing and boosted industrial production, yet simultaneously triggered hostile political reactions more anti-immigrant legislation and nativist voting despite the economic gains.  

Takeaway. The economics and the politics of immigration can move in opposite directions: measurable local benefits coexisted with intense backlash.  

6 Synthesis

Across designs and eras, the credible causal evidence resists the simple story that immigrants "take jobs" and depress wages. Adverse wage effects, where present, tend to be modest and concentrated among the most substitutable natives; employers and natives adjust through technology, task reallocation, and internal migration; and immigration can raise native occupational standing and aggregate output. The recurring methodological lesson is that local labour-market estimates depend critically on the adjustment margins one allows employment, mobility, capital substitution so the choice of geographic unit and time horizon is as consequential as the identification strategy itself.  

References

1. Clemens, M. A., Lewis, E. G., and Postel, H. M. (2018). Immigration restrictions as active labor market policy: evidence from the Mexican Bracero exclusion. American Economic Review, 108(6), 1468-1487.  
2. Dustmann, C., Schönberg, U., and Stuhler, J. (2017). Labor supply shocks, native wages, and the adjustment of local employment. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 132(1), 435-483.  
3. Foged, M., and Peri, G. (2016). Immigrants' effect on native workers: new analysis on longitudinal data. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 8(2), 1-34.  
4. Monras, J. (2020). Immigration and wage dynamics: evidence from the Mexican peso crisis. Journal of Political Economy, 128(8), 3017-3089.  
5. Tabellini, M. (2020). Gifts of the immigrants, woes of the natives: lessons from the age of mass migration. Review of Economic Studies, 87(1), 454-486.