The Effects of Immigration on Wages and Employment Essay

The Effects of Immigration on Wages and Employment - Essay Example The essay "The Effects of Immigration on Wages and Employment" analyzes the effect of immigration on the wages and employment rates of a particular area in terms of the effects for each city outmigration and reduced in-migration. Suffice to say, the mobility of workers both domestically and internationally has become commonplace thus altering the composition of the workforce in various places. Legal migrants form a substantial portion of the workforce in the United States. It is important to evaluate the impact of both the international migrations to the US and the domestic migrations on the native workers. According to Card (2005), immigration does not have a notable impact on the wages of both the natives and the immigrant workers. Card indicates that large differences in the proportions of immigrants do not cause differences in the relative wages. In order to investigate the effect of immigration on wages and employment, Card compared cities with large versus small numbers of immigrants. He also factored in the effects for each city outmigration and reduced in-migration. Card found out that immigration had a negligible effect on skilled and unskilled wages. Peri (2010) took a task analytic approach to investigate the study in focus. According to Peri, workers are in different occupations. For instance, natives have a better command of English language and therefore more suited for communication-oriented tasks compared to immigrants who specialize in jobs that are manual oriented. Peri also indicates that native born workers take on managerial tasks while educated immigrants are likely to work in specialized roles as engineers, doctors or scientists. Ultimately, a large a number of immigrant workers could lead to increased productivity of the natives and thus increase their wages and employment rate rather than decreasing them. Card, Borjas and Peri used fundamentally different methods to study the effects of immigration on wages and employment. Borjas’ findings were based on an intrinsic grouping of people based on social factors and comparing their wages and employment rate vis a vis proportion of immigration in their cities. It is imperative to not that Card used the same groupings and made findings to the effect that immigration had negligible effects on wages and employment. The difference in findings between Borjas and Card can be attributed to the fact the Borjas failed to consider the effect of capital investments changes to the production function. Peri a task oriented approach to evaluate the differences in terms of jobs that natives and immigrants undertook. It is notable that the findings of Card, Peri and Borjas are based on the methods that they used to conduct their studies. It is not possible to arrive at a generalized conclusion on the effects of immigrants on the wages and employment rates. However, both Peri and Card tentatively agree that the immigrants do not necessarily cause a negative impact on employment rates and wages. 2. Worker mobility is an important factor in market economies since it allows for free movement of workers to obtain employment of their choice. The