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Report
The impact of migration on earnings inequality in New England
Migration plays an important role in the New England economy; absent immigration, the region?s population and workforce would have shrunk in recent years. Yet increasingly, immigrant inflows have been met with legislative opposition at both the national and regional levels, motivated in part by concerns that immigration may be an important factor driving the marked rise in earnings inequality. The research findings presented in this report, however, indicate that immigration accounts for a very small portion?only 6.0 percent?of the rising earnings inequality that the region has experienced. ...
Journal Article
The Allocation of Immigrant Talent Across Countries
Immigrants are not only overrepresented in lower-paying jobs but are also paid less on average than native counterparts.
Briefing
Aging and declining populations in northern New England: is there a role for immigration?
In hundreds of communities across northern New England, the population is aging rapidly and becoming smaller. The entire country is aging, but northern New England stands out: Among the populations of all US states, those of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont have the top-three highest median ages, respectively. The situation is even more extreme in northern New England?s rural counties, where the populations of the smallest towns generally are substantially older than those of the rest of the region. These communities also have seen the slowest, or even negative, population growth over the ...
Journal Article
Rising Immigration Has Helped Cool an Overheated Labor Market
The United States has experienced a substantial influx of immigrants over the past two years. In 2023, net international migration surpassed its pre-pandemic peak. This flow of immigrant workers has acted as a powerful catalyst in cooling overheated labor markets and tempering wage growth across industries and states.
Journal Article
Why Immigration Is an Urban Phenomenon
Immigration is fundamentally an urban phenomenon. Both in the United States and elsewhere, immigrants settle primarily in cities—especially high-wage, high cost-of-living cities. The most likely reason is that immigrants often send a significant share of their income back to their origin country. As a result, they value a city’s high wages and are less discouraged by the high living costs than native-born workers. Migration policies can reinforce this urban concentration pattern.
Working Paper
Immigration from a terror-prone nation: destination nation’s optimal immigration and counterterrorism policies
The paper presents a two-country model in which a destination country chooses its immigration quota and proactive counterterrorism actions in response to immigration from a terror-plagued source country. After the destination country fixes its two policies, immigrants decide between supplying labor or conducting terrorist attacks, which helps determine equilibrium labor supply and wages. The analysis accounts for the marginal disutility of lost rights/freedoms stemming from stricter counterterror measures as well the inherent radicalization of migrants. Comparative statics involve changes to ...
Briefing
The Impacts of Immigration: A Conference Recap
What role does immigration policy play in economic growth? How does the quality of college-educated workers differ across country? Do firms that hire more skilled immigrants perform better than firms that do not? These were among the questions addressed by economists during a recent Richmond Fed research conference.
COVID-19 and Unauthorized Immigration at the Southwest Border
A drop in U.S. enforcement encounters in the spring suggested the pandemic temporarily slowed unauthorized entry attempts, but such encounters have risen in recent months.
Working Paper
Where Did the Workers Go? The Effect of COVID Immigration Restrictions on Post-Pandemic Labor Market Tightness
During the COVID pandemic there were unprecedented shortfalls in immigration. At the same time, during the economic recovery, the labor market was tight, with the number of vacancies per unemployed worker reaching 2.5, more than twice its pre-pandemic average. In this paper, we investigate whether these two trends are linked. We do not find evidence to support the hypothesis that the immigration shortfalls caused the tight labor market for two reasons. First, at the peak, we were missing about 2 million immigrant workers, but this number had largely recovered by February 2022 just as the ...
Working Paper
Why stop there? Mexican migration to the U.S. border region
The transformation of the U.S. border economy since the 1980s provides a fascinating backdrop to explore how migration to the U.S-side of the Mexican border has changed vis-a-vis migration to the U.S. interior. Some long-standing patterns of border migrants remained unchanged during this period while others underwent drastic changes. For example, border migrants are consistently more likely to be female, to have migrated within Mexico, and to lack migrant networks as compared with migrants to the U.S. interior. Meanwhile, the occupational profile of border migrants has changed drastically ...