The Economic Consequences of the International Migration of Labor

Abstract

In this paper, I selectively discuss recent empirical work on the consequences of global labor mobility. I examine how international migration affects the incomes of individuals in sending and receiving countries and of migrants themselves. Were a social planner to choose the migration policies that would maximize global welfare, she would need to know, among other values, the elasticities of wages, prices, taxes, and government transfers with respect to national labor supplies as well as how these parameters vary across countries. My goal is to evaluate the progress of the literature in terms of providing these inputs.