Abstract
Abstract During the African American Great Migration, millions of blacks left the Southern USA in favor of cities in the North. Despite the social and economic consequences of this migration, the question of its impacts on labor markets in the North has largely been overlooked in the literature. In this paper, I use both local wage comparisons and structural simulations of the aggregate Northern labor market to provide new evidence on the effects of the Great Migration on wages in the North, redoubling the evidence that it caused large declines in wages for blacks, with little effect for whites. The agreement between my local and aggregate wage effect estimates has implications for our general understanding of how immigration and wages are related and how that relationship can be measured.
Highlights
During the African American Great Migration, millions of blacks left their places of birth in the Southern USA in favor of cities in the North
4 Conclusions Comparing local labor markets, I find that Southern immigration decreased the wages paid to blacks working in the North substantially, an effect which was driven by competition from Southern black immigrants
I do find evidence of outmigration among whites, my estimates do not imply that outmigration offset immigration entirely, suggesting that spatial arbitrage alone cannot explain the lack of an apparent wage effect for whites
Summary
During the African American Great Migration, millions of blacks left their places of birth in the Southern USA in favor of cities in the North. Because I find evidence of considerable separation between the black and white labor markets in the North, this finding implies that internal migration within the North did not arbitrage away Southern-immigration-induced relative local labor supply shocks for blacks.. Because I find evidence of considerable separation between the black and white labor markets in the North, this finding implies that internal migration within the North did not arbitrage away Southern-immigration-induced relative local labor supply shocks for blacks.3 Another potential explanation for the divergence between the results of local and national immigration studies is that inflows of foreign immigrants to the contemporary USA do not alter the skill distribution in a way that affects natives’ wages in the long run. Each new analysis helps complete our picture of the relationship between immigration and wages
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