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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 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 purpose of this paper is to address the role of cognitive skills and extent of skill use at work in explaining the immigrant–native wage gap in Europe. The study targets immigrant–native disparities in literacy and numeracy cognitive skills, as important, yet not exhaustive factor behind immigrants’ wage penalty.

The research relies on the Program of International Assessment of Adult Competencies data for 15 European countries. The empirical analysis employs multivariate regression analysis and incorporates the full set of plausible values for each skill domain, to correctly measure cognitive skills. To estimate standard errors, the authors employ Jackknife replication methodology with 80 replication weights and final population weight.

The authors document that, on average, immigrants achieve substantially worse scores in literacy and numeracy test domains. Only highly educated immigrants tend to improve their skills over time in host countries. The results of wage gap analysis indicate that having cognitive skills, demographic profile and occupation category comparable to natives does not yield comparable wage rate. The remaining wage gap results from the systematic differences in skills application at work, as immigrants use their skills to lower extent, relative to natives.

The research employs a novel measure of productive human capital, which accounts for cognitive skills in literacy and numeracy domains, and frequencies of skill use at work. It allows to more precisely evaluate the immigrant–native disparity in human capital application and its reflection on the wage rate.

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.

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 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.

There has been an increasing number of allegations of discrimination toward US employees and anecdotal indications of immigrant employee exploitation in the information technology sector. The purpose of this paper is to investigate if applicants’ work visa status causes native-born applicants to be treated differentially (less favorably) than foreign-born applicants.

A correspondence study design is used to observe differential screening processes by measuring the frequency of favorable job application responses received by foreign-born applicants compared to equally skilled native-born applicants.

Results from the study suggest that fictitious Asian foreign-born applicants who demonstrate the need for H-1B work visa sponsorship for employment receive significantly more favorable e-mail responses to job ads than US native-born applicants. Moreover, white native-born applicants are approximately 23 percent less likely than Asian foreign-born applicants to receive a request for an interview.

Because of the chosen method, the research results may lack generalizability. The hypotheses should be tested further by targeting more geographical locations, a variety of industries and using qualitative methods in future research.

The paper includes implications for hiring managers who wish to reduce their liability for employment discrimination and foreign-born job seekers wishing to manage their expectations of the recruitment process.

This paper fulfills an identified need to empirically study how the work visa status of job seekers affects early recruitment as increasingly more anecdotal evidence of immigrant exploitation and discrimination in the technology sector is reported.

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 study is to examine the causal impact of international immigration inflows on housing prices at the state level in Malaysia from 2007 to 2018.

Hedonic regressions using both fixed effects and first difference approaches are used to estimate the impact of immigration inflows on house prices in Malaysia. This study deals with potential endogeneity of immigrants’ choices of destination states in Malaysia by using a shift-share instrument variable approach. Specifically, historical shares of immigrants in a state are used to predict current immigrant inflows to a particular state. The predicted value of immigration flows is then inserted into the house price regression models in place of the actual immigration flows.

Using annual data for 14 states from 2007 to 2018, this study documents the positive impact of immigration inflows on house prices in Malaysia. The authors find that a 1% increase in immigration inflows is associated with an increase of 10.2% (first difference) and 13.4% (fixed effects) in house prices. The economic impact is larger in magnitude than that found in developed countries. Contrary to existing studies that find immigration inflows to be associated with native flight, the authors find support for the attraction effects hypothesis, where immigration inflow is positive and significantly related to net native flows.

The effects of immigration inflows are economically significant, considering that the effects are 10 times larger than those documented in the USA. Policymakers in Malaysia ought to monitor house price trends in immigrant-popular states to ensure that natives are not priced out by new immigrants.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is perhaps the first study to focus on the relationship between immigration inflows and house prices in Malaysia. Focusing on Malaysia has at least two originality aspects. First, Malaysia is relatively not an immigrant-popular destination. Second, Malaysia has a multiracial and heterogenous society among its natives. The findings, obtained within these two settings, would therefore provide a wider scope of result generalization, and natural experiment grounds for causal implications of our results.

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.