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The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of immigration on the labour market outcomes of low-educated natives (i.e. residents without a university diploma). Using the labour market competition theory, which argues that the labour market effects of natives depend on the skill set of immigrants, the paper addresses whether immigrants are complementary to or substitutes for native workers.

Longitudinal matched employer–employee data on Sweden are used to estimate how low-educated natives, in regions experiencing the greatest influx of refugees from the Balkan wars, responded to this supply shock with regard to real wages, employment and job mobility between 1990 and 2003.

First, the analysis shows that low-educated native workers respond to the arrival of immigrants with an increase in real wages. Second, although employment prospects in general worsened for low-skilled workers in most regions, this is not attributable to the regions experiencing the largest supply shock. Third, there are indications that low-skilled natives in immigration-rich regions are more likely to change workplace, particularly in combination with moving upwards in the wage distribution.

Rather than seeing an emergence of the commonly perceived displacement mechanism when an economy is subject to a supply shock, the regional findings suggest that high inflows of immigrants tend to induce a mechanism that pulls native workers upwards in the wage distribution. This is important, as the proportion of immigrants is seldom evenly distributed within a nation.

The finding that immigrants are more likely to self-employ than natives has been consistently shown by different researchers. At the same time, many call for the prioritization of high-skilled immigration as they believe low-skilled entrepreneurs are not particularly innovative or high-growth-oriented. The purpose of this study is to critically review and synthesize the current literature on immigrant self-employment, paying particular attention to low-skilled immigrant entrepreneurship and the popular policy recommendation that high-skilled immigrants should be prioritized.

The authors survey the existing literature on immigrant self-employment and discuss recurring data issues, how those issues have or have not been addressed, as well as how these data issues impact the validity of policy recommendations that favor high-skilled immigrants and disfavor low-skilled immigrants. In particular, the authors examine how length of stay in the host country and host country institutions impact immigrant self-employment, especially low-skilled immigrant self-employment. The authors also point out unintended consequences of low-skilled immigration.

The authors find data issues significantly impact the potential justifications behind calls to favor high-skilled immigrants. In particular, many researchers underestimate the positive impacts of low-skilled immigrant self-employment by not accounting for institutions and length of stay in the host country. The authors conclude with policy recommendations that prioritize high-skilled immigration should be re-examined in light of recurring omitted variable biases within previous studies and evidence of a number of positive unintended consequences associated with low-skilled migration.

The authors review current literature and discuss how important confounding variables, like the number of years an immigrant entrepreneur has lived in a host country and the institutions of a host country, make common policy recommendations suggesting prioritization of high-skilled immigration problematic. The authors also discuss potential solutions to these data issues, ways these issues have been solved already, and possible ways forward. Finally, after considering the literature, the authors offer our own set of policy recommendations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether natives’ attitudes toward immigration is associated with an influx of high- and low-skilled immigrants. The current research focuses on selected 20 OECD countries as destination countries.

A pseudo-panel based on age cohort is constructed to control for the potential unobservable individual characteristics. The random effects and within estimators (where applicable) are applied in the panel-data setting.

Regression results indicate that natives’ attitudes depend on their labor market exposure and skill type. Low-skill immigrant inflows are negatively associated with natives’ attitudes, but the magnitude is reduced proportionally to their share of the high skilled. The association between immigrant flows and attitudes is particularly strong for the prime-age cohorts, which can be explained by the labor market competition mechanism.

Given the data limitations, not all destination countries could be analyzed but only selected OECD countries. However, this situation has resulted in the sample destination countries sharing similar characteristics with advanced economies.

Although the majority of previous studies are based on survey questions on attitudes toward immigrants with respective skill type, the current study focuses on the effects of the actual immigration flows. Natives’ attitudes respond sensitively to the actual changes in the number of migrants. The selection of OECD countries makes the characteristics of the destination countries substantially homogeneous.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of an increase in the relative supply of immigrants on natives’ task reallocation, with a focus on Germany. Specifically, it investigates whether natives, as a response to increased immigration, re-specialise in communication-intensive occupations, where they arguably have a comparative advantage due to language proficiency.

The analysis uses regional data from the German Labour Force Survey between 2002 and 2014. To derive data on job tasks requirements, it employs the US Department of Labor’s O*NET database, the results of which are tested through a sensitivity analysis using the European Working Condition Survey and the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies data sets.

The paper finds that indeed German workers respond to increasing immigration by shifting their task supply and providing more communication relative to manual tasks. Importantly, the decrease in the supply of communication tasks is stronger and more robust than the increase in the supply of manual tasks, pointing to a potential displacement effect taking place between natives and immigrants, alongside task reallocation. This would suggest that countries with relatively more rigid labour markets are less responsive to immigration shocks. Moreover, it suggests that labour market rigidity can minimise the gains from immigration and exacerbate employment effects.

The paper not only investigates task reallocation as a result of immigration in a different institutional context and labour market functioning, but the results feed into broader policy and scholarly discussions on the effects of immigration, including questions about how the institutional context affects labour market adjustment to immigration, worker occupational mobility in a more rigid labour markets and the fine balance needed between flexibility and rigidity.

This paper analyzes the impact of immigration on low-skill native workers using pooled CPS data on cities in static and dynamic fixed effects models. Labor force participation is shown to be the dominant adjustment mechanism to immigrant inflows. Furthermore, native participation responses are stronger in immigrant-dense cities than in areas with sparser concentrations. These results hold after accounting for the potential endogeneity of immigrant locational decisions. The labor supply adjustments absorb most of the impact of immigration, and account for the weakness of the observed effects of immigration on wages and employment.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of migrant workers on the output growth of 15 sub-industries of the manufacturing sector in Malaysia during the period 1990–2008. The paper seeks to answer the following critical questions: what is the impact of migrant workers on the output growth of the manufacturing sector, the leading sector of Malaysian economy? It is possible that migrant workers with different skill levels may have different impacts on output growth of such sector?

The paper employs three econometric techniques: mean group, dynamic fixed effect and the pooled mean group on extended form for Cobb–Douglas production function.

The overall findings suggest that due to the inflow of low skills of migrant workers, output growth in the manufacturing sectors is likely to witnesses a marginal decline in the long run.

The present study complements previous studies by providing a quantitative assessment of the impact of migrant workers on output growth in the manufacturing sector in Malaysia, which is not attempted in extant literature. More importantly, the analysis considers the probability that migrant workers with different skill levels may have different impacts on the growth of output in the manufacturing sector.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse if introduction of new technologies and work practices are negatively related to the employment opportunities of immigrants.

A representative plant-level panel survey merged with register data is used. Random effect regression Tobit models are estimated. The dependent variable is wage costs share of immigrants at the plant. The important explanatory variables are measures of new technologies and work practices.

The results show that workplaces where employees use personal computers intensively and have broad autonomy hire fewer non-western immigrants who have not been raised in Norway. The negative relationship is especially strong for low-skilled non-western immigrants.

The estimation framework for studying this topic is new. The paper also presents original evidence on the relationship between characteristics of the “new” economy and demand for immigrant workers.

As immigrants live, learn, and earn in the US, the earnings of comparably educated immigrants converge regardless of their country or admission status. Indeed, controlling for initial human capital levels, there is an inverse relationship between immigrant entry earnings and earnings growth. Immigrants initially lacking transferable skills have lower initial earnings but a higher propensity to invest in human capital than natives or high-skill-transferability immigrants. Policies that bring in immigrants lacking immediately transferable skills, such as family-based admission policies, may provide an infusion of undervalued flexible human capital that facilitates innovation and entrepreneurship. Low-skill-transferability immigration may foster the development of immigrant employment that is distinct from native-born employment and possibly reduce employment competition with natives. Those who enter without immediately transferable skills are more likely to be permanent and permanence confers a variety of societal benefits. Because human capital that is not valued in the host-country's labor market is still useful for learning new skills, immigrants who initially lack transferable skills provide the host country an undervalued, highly malleable resource that may promote a vibrant economy in the long run.

The purpose of this paper is to seek test for the precondition for labour-market competition between immigrants and natives, which implies that both are willing to accept jobs that do not differ in quality.

To test this hypothesis, using Spanish data, the paper analyses whether immigrants and natives exhibit different tastes for working conditions. The paper proceeds as follows. First, the paper estimates job satisfaction equations, where working conditions enter as covariates. Second, the paper tests whether the package of (dis)amenities inherent to their jobs differ. Additionally, the paper also tests for assimilation of immigrant workers in terms of job quality.

The paper finds that immigrant and native workers tend to exhibit the same taste for most on-the-job amenities. However, immigrants are more tolerant with jobs involving poorer environmental working conditions, more physically demanding tasks and higher exposure to physical damage. The paper also finds that immigrant workers tend to be employed in lower quality jobs. However, some of the bad working conditions tend to improve over time, suggesting some assimilation in terms of job quality.

The type of analysis the authors carry out here allows them to contribute to the literature by moving a step away from the conventional approach used in previous studies. While previous literature mostly analyses the effect of immigration in natives’ labour market outcomes and assimilation of immigrants in terms of wages and employment, this study is one of the few that focus on working conditions and the quality of jobs.

Whether immigrants are positively or negatively self-selected is much disputed. Whereas most previous studies have addressed this question by comparing the earnings of immigrants to those of U.S. natives, this analysis uses occupation to examine the skill level of immigrants relative to their home country population. Data on the occupational distribution of individuals granted legal permanent residence in 1995 indicate that the proportion of immigrants in skilled occupations is related to the corresponding proportion in source countries but not necessarily to the return to skill and other economic factors in the country of origin.