Do Immigrants Take or Create Residents’ Jobs? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Switzerland

Abstract

We estimate the causal effect of immigration on unemployment, employment and wages of resident employees in Switzerland, whose foreign labor force has increased by 32.8% in the last ten years. To address endogeneity of immigration into different labor market cells, we develop new variants of the shift-share instrument that exploit only that part in the variation of immigration which can be explained by migration push-factors in the source countries. While OLS estimates suggest that immigrants have crowded out natives, our quasi-experimental results reveal that immigration has in fact reduced unemployment and increased employment of residents in the last decade.