The Economist just published a very nice writeup of my Mariel paper.The article captures the essence of the paper very nicely. Over 60 percent of the Marielitos were high school dropouts. It seems more than obvious today that if we want to find out what Mariel did, perhaps we should look at what happened to the wage of similarly educated workers who were living in Miami at the time. Remarkably, that had not been done until I wrote my Mariel reappraisal. As The Economist puts it: “Mr Borjas’s paper shows that empirical results may depend on exactly where researchers look.”
There is a lot of wisdom in those words. Just keep looking in all the wrong places, and one will never discover what the impact of immigration really is. For example, one empirical trick that is often used to “hide” the impact is to define the population of low-skill workers as the aggregate of high school graduates and high school dropouts (click here for a technical discussion, and pages 14-17 here for an English translation). Because there are tens of millions of high school graduates, the impact of immigration on the smaller group of the least skilled workers gets diluted. And it’s usually too late, only after the inevitable political reaction occurs, that we find out that some people were really harmed.
Here’s a quick link to a description of my Mariel analysis, to the paper itself, and to the data.
