Do Migrants Rob Jobs? Lessons of Australian History, 1861–1991

Abstract

Historically, lands of recent settlement have had a thirst for immigrants, but one that has been procyclical (negatively related to unemployment rates). For a period in the early 1980s, Australia's major political parties supported high immigration in spite of rising unemployment. This article explores the long-run relationship between immigration and local unemployment, posing the question, “Do migrants rob jobs?” It also seeks to apply long-run historical analysis to recent economic debate: would Australia's unemployment rate have been lower in very recent times without so many immigrants?

Mass Migration, Commodity Market Integration and Real Wage Convergence: The Late Nineteenth Century Atlantic Economy

“…This view was certainly dominant in the historical literature of the 1950s and 1960s when Keynesian thinking was in vogue (Thomas, 1954;Easterlin, 1968;Abramovitz, 1961Abramovitz, , 1968. A modern version has recently been offered to account for the view that immigrants never robbed jobs from Australians in the past (Pope and Withers, 1990). While this view might be credible in the short run, it is very unlikely, in our view, to be credible for periods spanning as much as forty years.…”

Labor market institutions and the effect of immigration on national employment

“…Other methods to estimate displacement effect of immigration are, for example, estimation of a production function and elasticity with respect to labor or time-series approach which allows for Granger causality tests (see Layard et al 1991, Pope andWithers [1993]). …”

Immigration in a Population Context

“…This is because for every job taken, every import required and every dollar of public support needed, migrants generate at least as many new jobs, exports and public revenues. This is because the indirect effects of migrants on the economy offset such direct effects, producing a broadly balanced outcome for the macroeconomy in the short term and a real per capita payoff in the longer term (Pope and Withers 1993;Castles et al 1998;Islam and Fausten 2008;Docquier, Ozden and Peri 2010;Pincus and Sloan 2012).…”