The Employment and Wage Effects of Immigration: Trade and Labour Economics Perspectives

Abstract

We may not be living in the age of mass migration, but we are surely living in an age of mass migration.1 From 1965 through 1990 a fairly constant 2.2 per cent of the world population have been migrants.2 However, this has involved an increasing rate of change to keep pace with the growing world population: the stock of migrants grew at 1.2 per cent from 1965 to 1975; 2.2 per cent from 1975 to 1985; and 2.6 per cent from 1985 to 1990. More importantly, for the purposes of this chapter, relative to regional population the share of migrants in the US and Canada rose from 6 per cent in 1965 to 8.6 per cent in 1990 (with the greatest growth in the 1980s and 1990s) while the share in Western Europe rose from 3.6 to 6.1 per cent over the same period. This period has also seen a substantial shift toward developing countries as source countries for this migration: in the United States this share rose from 42 per cent in 1960-64 to over 80 per cent in the 1980s and 1990s; in Canada this share rose from 12 to over 70 per cent, while this share in Australia rose from 7 to over 70 per cent. In the 1990s, Germany and Austria experienced very large flows from Eastern Europe as well.KeywordsImmigration PolicyLabour Market OutcomeWage InequalityUnskilled LabourWage EffectThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.