Last fall I blogged about a new study by George Borjas that reassesses the wage impact of the “Mariel boatlift.” The boatlift has a special place in the minds of labor economists. After Fidel Castro announced in 1980 that Cubans were free to leave via the port of Mariel, some 125,000 came to Miami in a single summer. This large and unexpected wave of newcomers created an intriguing test of how immigration affects wages. Surprisingly, economist David Card was unable to detect any wage impact in his 1990 study, and that result has since become Exhibit A in the economic case for expanding immigration.
Enter Borjas. His analysis found that the boatlift did have a large negative impact on native high-school dropouts in Miami. Borjas’s study was quickly followed by a rebuttal paper from economists Giovanni Peri and Vasil Yasenov. Then Borjas filed a counter-rebuttal, which includes the charge that Peri and Yasenov bizarrely categorized high-school kids with part-time jobs as “dropouts.” This is about as entertaining as academic debates get, as both rebuttals feature some understated insults reminiscent of a Downton Abbey script.
For those interested in a plain-English explanation of the dispute, I wrote a piece for Real Clear Policy last week that goes into some depth. And for those who are especially keen on technical matters, the Center for Immigration Studies today published an expanded version of my piece as a new backgrounder. Here I’ll just skip to the bottom line: Although I feel that Borjas has the better argument, both sides should agree that the Mariel boatlift is not really the grand natural experiment that it has been made out to be. There are too many variables at play, too many data limitations, too many uncertainties. If it is truly “naive” — Peri and Yasenov’s word — to believe that increasing the supply of labor will lower its price, immigration advocates must look beyond Mariel to prove it.
Mariel Boatlift Study -- Immigration's Relationship to Wages