The Labor-Market Impact of High-Skill Immigration

摘要

The fraction of doctoral degrees awarded to foreign students rose from 11.3 to 24.4 percent between 1976 and 2000, with nonresident aliens receiving a remarkably high share of the doctoral degrees awarded in the physical sciences (36.5 percent in 2000), engineering (50:7 percent), and the life sciences (25.7 percent) (U.S. Department of Education, 2002 [tables 207, 270, 272]). Over half of the foreign-born doctorates remain in the United States (Michael Finn, 2003), suggesting they may have a sizable impact on the labor market for high-skill workers. This paper addresses a core question in any evaluation of the costs and benefits of the foreign student program: Have foreign students harmed the economic opportunities of competing native workers? The foreign student influx provides a near-ideal research framework for measuring the impact of immigration. Although an exogenous supply increase in a particular field at a particular time may affect the education decisions of future generations of students, there is relatively little that current doctorates can do about the situation except to absorb the supply shock—presumably through lower wages.