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The literature on the impact of immigration on the labor market is highly controversial. The aim of this paper is to review the existing literature and draw some general conclusions on how wages and employment respond to immigration. Economic studies indicate that the impact of immigration on the average wage and employment of native workers is null or slightly positive. However, because adjustments take time, the immediate labor market effects of unexpected (as opposed to expected) migration episodes can be detrimental. Immigration also can have distributional consequences. In particular, the skill composition of immigrants matters in determining their impact on native labor market outcomes. An inflow of immigrants will tend to reduce the wages of competing native workers (with skills similar to those of the migrants), and increase those of complementary workers (with skills that complement those of immigrants). By affecting the skill composition of the workforce, immigration can create winners and losers among native workers via changes in the wage structure.

This paper investigates the importance of ethnic homophily in the hiring discrimination process, and provides a novel test for statistical discrimination. Our evidence comes from a correspondence test performed in France, in which we use three different kinds of ethnic identification: French sounding names, North African sounding names, and "foreign" sounding names with no clear ethnic association. Within both male and female groups, we show that all non-French applicants are equally discriminated against when compared to French applicants. This indicates that racial discrimination in employment is directed against members of non-majority ethnic groups, and highlights the importance of favoritism for in-group members. Moreover we find direct evidence of homophily: recruiters with European names are more likely to call back French named applicants and female recruiters are more likely to call back women. The paper also directly tests for statistical discrimination by adding a signal related to language skill ability in all resumes sent to half the job offers. Although the signal inclusion significantly impacts the discrimination experienced by non-French females, it is much weaker for male minorities.

International audienceWe quantify the overall impact of immigration on native wages in France from 1990 to 2010. Our short-run simulations indicate that immigration has decreased native wages by 0.6%. We find on average no impact of immigration on wages in the long run. However, we show that the long-run effects of immigration on wages are detrimental to high-skilled native workers and benefits to low-skilled native workers. Our structural estimation allows us to evaluate the impact of “selective” migration policies. In particular, we find that selective immigration policies toward highly educated workers reduce the wage dispersion of French native workers

This paper investigates the immigration impact on native outcomes using microlevel data for France. I find that immigration does not affect the wages of competing natives, but induces adverse employment effects. This finding is consistent with a wage structure that is rigid in France. The quality of the data allows to dig more deeply into the interpretation of the immigration impact. First, I show that immigrants displace native workers because they are more willing to work at lower wages due to lower outside options. Second, I find that natives on short-term contracts, who are less subject to wage rigidities, do experience wage losses due to immigration.

HighlightsThis paper investigates how the prevalence of minimum wage affects the labor market impact of immigration.Our identification strategy uses the non-linearity created by the coexistence in the United States of stateand federal-level minimum wages.We find that immigration has relatively small detrimental effects on the wages and employment outcomes of competing native workers.However, the impact of immigration on natives' labor market outcomes is more negative in states where the effective minimum wage is relatively low. AbstractThis paper exploits the non-linearity in the level of minimum wages across U.S. States created by the coexistence of federal and state regulations to investigate how the prevalence of minimum wages affects the labor market impact of immigration. We find that the effects of immigration on the wages and employment of native workers within a given state-skill cell are more negative in U.S. States with low minimum wages (i.e., where the federal minimum wage is binding). The results are robust to instrumenting immigration and state effective minimum wages, and to implementing a difference-in-differences approach comparing U.S. States where effective minimum wages are fully determined by the federal minimum wage over the whole period considered (2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013) to U.S. States where this is never the case. This paper thus underlines the important role played by minimum wages in mitigating any adverse labor market effects of low-skill immigration.

This paper investigates the dynamics of wage adjustment to an exogenous increase in labor supply exploiting the sudden and unexpected inflow of repatriates to France resulting from Algerian independence in 1962. I measure the impact of this particular supply shift on the average wage of pre-existing native workers across French regions between 1962 and 1976. I find that regional wages decreased between 1962 and 1968, before returning to their pre-shock level 15 years after. I also investigate the dynamics of skill-specific wages in response to the regional penetration of repatriates and find that the wages of high and low educated native workers declined initially but fully recovered by 1976.

remercions Clémence Berson, Eric Cédiey, Yannick l'Horty, Amine Ouazad, Marie-Anne Valfort et Constantine Yannelis pour leurs remarques précieuses à différentes étapes de ce travail. Nous tenons également à remercier le CEPREMAP pour son soutien financier.