The Economics of Immigration

"The Economics of Immigration. Theory and Policy" is written as a both a reference for researchers and as a textbook on the economics of immigration. It is aimed at two audiences: (1) researchers who are interested in learning more about how economists approach the study of human migration flows; and (2) graduate students taking a course on migration or a labor economics course where immigration is one of the subfields studied. The book covers the economic theory of immigration, which explains why people move across borders and details the consequences of such movements for the source and destination economies. The book also describes immigration policy, providing both a history of immigration policy in a variety of countries and using the economic theory of immigration to explain the determinants and consequences of the policies. The timing of this book coincides with the emergence of immigration as a major political and economic issue in the USA, Japan Europe and many developing countries.

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The inspiration for this book came from a collaborative research project on immigration, begun in 2001, when we were colleagues at University of Nebraska- Lincoln (Bodvarsson was a Visiting Professor there in 2001-05). Our project dealt with the application of Say's Law to the supply of immigrant labor, meaning that when the supply of immigrant labor grows in an area, the new immigrants, being consumers, bolster labor demand and help to offset the lower wages they may bring about. Our test case was the seemingly obscure Dawson County, Nebraska, where the meatpacking industry experienced a relatively huge increase in Hispanic-born labor supply around 1990. We found for Dawson County this ''demand effect'' to be signi?cant and our results for this test case generalizable to other, more prominent, test cases. This inspired us to study the famous Mariel Boatlift, where Miami's labor force grew suddenly by 7% due to the arrival of nearly 125,000 Cuban refugees in the spring of 1980. In that study, we showed that the Marielitos exerted a signi?cant demand effect, which we argue helps to account for the stylized fact that the Mariel in?ux had a relatively benign effect on the Miami labor market. We had the privilege of presenting both studies at various conferences in the USA, Norway, Taiwan and Israel, and these studies have been published in Labour Economics and the Research in Labor Economics series (both studies are discussed in detail in this book).

Contenu

Introduction.- Part I: Immigartion Theroy and Evidence.- The Determinants of International Migration: Theory.- Why People Immigrate: The Evidence.- Who Immigrates? Theory and Evidence.- The Effects of Immigration on the Destination Economy: The Theory.- How Immigration Impacts the Destination Economy: The Evidence.- Estimating Immigration's Impact: Accounting fro all Adjustments.- Immigartion and the Source Country.- Economic Growth and Immigration.- Part II: Immigration Issues and Cases.- Temporary Immigration, Involuntary Immigration, and Other Variations on the Standard Model.- Unauthorized Immigration.- Hispanic Immigration to the United States.- Part III: Immigration Policy: Introduction.- Immigration Policy in the United States.- Immigration Policy in Canada.- Immigration Policy in Europe.- Conclusions and Final Obersvations.