Labor Markets Initiative: Research
The current U.S. legal immigration system includes few visas for low-skilled workers, and employers have relied heavily on an unauthorized workforce in many low-skilled occupations. This issue brief explains the questions that policymakers must grapple with when designing programs for admission of low-skill workers, for temporary as well as permanent entry. The brief focuses in part on the recent agreement by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO regarding admission of future low-skilled workers.
This report highlights gaps and anomalies in labor protection, while recognizing that U.S. law sets significant standards for minimum wage, overtime pay, child labor, safe and healthy workplaces, antidiscrimination, labor organizing, and collective bargaining.
Notwithstanding the broad consensus on the benefits of highly skilled immigration, the economic role of less-skilled immigrants is one of the more controversial questions in the immigration debate. While less-skilled immigrants bring economic benefits for U.S. consumers, employers, and skilled workers, they impose some costs on U.S. workers competing for similar jobs.
Immigrants have been disproportionately hit by the global economic crisis that began in 2008 and now confront a number of challenges. The report, which has a particular focus on Germany, Ireland, Spain, the United Kingdom, and United States finds that the unemployment gap between immigrant and native workers has widened in many places.
A broad consensus exists that the long-term impact of immigration on Americans' average income is small but positive, improving employment, productivity, and income. In the short term, however, immigration may slightly reduce native employment and average income. This report provides an analysis of short- and long-run impacts of immigration over the business cycle.
An examination of illegal immigration's overall impact on the U.S. economy, which this report finds is negligible despite clear benefits for employers and unauthorized immigrants and slightly depressed wages for low-skilled native workers.
This report analyzes employment and unemployment patterns from 1994 to 2008, offers possible explanations for why labor market outcomes for immigrants have been more cyclical, and proposes possible public policy solutions for mitigating immigrants’ vulnerability to the business cycle.
In order to rectify the shortcomings of a rigid and outdated U.S. visa system set in place by the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), this report recommends creating a new visa stream called provisional visas which would sync visa policies with the way in which labor markets work in practice, and bridge temporary and permanent employment-based admissions to the United States in a predictable and transparent way.
This policy paper proposes creation of a permanent, independent executive-branch agency that would make regular recommendations to the president and Congress for adjusting employment-based immigration levels.The Standing Commission concept, first articulated by the MPI-convened Independent Task Force on Immigration and America's Future in its 2006 final report, would provide nonpartisan, timely, evidence-based, and impartial analysis that is vital for informed policymaking.
This report seeks to understand and predict the potential impact of the economic crisis that began in December 2007 on legal and illegal immigration flows to and from the United States, and the likely effects of an economic downturn on the labor market performance of immigrants.
This report examines foreign-born participation in the United States’ labor market. It provides information and charts relating to the number and share of immigrant workers in the total civilian labor force and their employment rates.
![CIRbrief LowSkilled[1]](https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/styles/publication_thumbnail/public/pub_covers/CIRbrief-LowSkilled%5B1%5D.jpg?itok=ujEGjyo4)
