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An Economist’s Guide to Economic History pp 79–86Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Immigration and Labour Markets

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Abstract

The increased importance of migration in many developed countries has sparked heated policy debates on its economic effects on immigrant-receiving countries. These debates, along with the increased demographic importance of migrants, have also fuelled academic interest. This chapter summarizes the core topics and debates in immigration economics, and then discusses how economic history informs them.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The economic costs and benefits for sending countries and migrants themselves have received less attention (Clemens 2011) but are not less important. For a synthesis of important lessons from the economics of emigration, see contributions to the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Summer 2011).

  2. 2.

    A key challenge in identifying the rate of convergence between immigrants and natives is to separate convergence from cohort effects (Borjas 1985), that is, from changes in the average skill level between successive immigrant cohorts. This requires the availability of longitudinal data that track individuals over time, or at least the availability of repeated cross-sectional data.

  3. 3.

    Measuring skills and inequality are key challenges for studying migrant selectivity in economic history. Stolz and Baten (2012), for instance, use the share of individuals who are able to report their exact age as a measure of skills and variation in human stature as a measure of inequality. More recently, Blum and Rei (2018) use height as a proxy for health and human capital when studying the selectivity of Jewish refugees from Europe to the USA between 1940 and 1942.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bayreuth, Bayreuth, Germany

    Sebastian T. Braun

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  1. Sebastian T. Braun
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK

    Matthias Blum

  2. Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK

    Christopher L. Colvin

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Braun, S.T. (2018). Immigration and Labour Markets. In: Blum, M., Colvin, C. (eds) An Economist’s Guide to Economic History. Palgrave Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96568-0_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96568-0_10

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