Immigration, occupations, and native wages: Long time trends in the US

The effect of immigration on the absorbing country is a major issue fueling public and academic debates. A foremost question is immigrants' impact on the native population's earnings. Using American data from 1970 to 2010, I examined the effects of immigrant proportion in a given occupation on natives' earnings. I estimated two different types of multilevel models: a cross-sectional and a lagged dependent model of the effect of changes in immigrants' occupational share on natives' wage growth. The findings suggest that occupations abundantly populated by immigrants are low-wage occupations. However, in most years the increase in immigrants' occupational share was not related to a decline in natives' wages. These combined results cast doubt on immigration affecting native wages, and suggest that the negative view of immigration might be overstated.