Wages of Mariel
The effect of the boatlift is re-evaluated
IT CAN be hard to work out the net impact of immigration on wages, especially in cities with bustling economies. The only way to try to tease out causality from coincidence is by hunting for a “natural experiment”: a historical event that is something like the randomised controlled tests scientists would conduct in a lab. For immigration, one such useful event is the Mariel boatlift of 1980.
This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “Wages of Mariel”
From the July 23rd 2016 edition
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