If you shut a border to protect domestic workers, do their wages actually rise?
Immigration Restrictions as Active Labor Market Policy: Evidence from the Mexican Bracero Exclusion
Michael A. Clemens, Ethan G. Lewis, Hannah M. Postel (2018) · American Economic Review 108(6)
Article ↗ · Replication data ↗ (openICPSR)
The archive requires an account we do not hold, so the files were not opened. What follows rests on the published abstract and on this platform's own observations.
What the authors found
Clemens, Lewis and Postel study the 1964 exclusion of nearly half a million Mexican bracero farm workers from the United States, a policy explicitly intended to raise wages and employment for domestic farm workers. They find it did not. States that lost the most braceros saw no relative rise in farm wages or employment: growers responded by mechanising and by switching to crops that needed less labour. The policy changed the technology rather than the paycheque.
What our data adds
Sixty years on, this database records the scale of what any comparable policy would now be acting against. The United States hosts 52.4 million people born elsewhere as of 2024, up from 47.9 million in 2015. Mexico receives remittances worth 3.5 per cent of its GDP in 2025, having held between 3.5 and 3.7 per cent since 2023. Both series are stocks and transfers rather than movements, and neither says anything about wages — but they set the order of magnitude of the labour market and the household incomes that a restriction operates on.
| Figure | Value | Indicator |
|---|---|---|
| People living in the US who were born elsewhere, 2024 | 52.4m | SM.POP.TOTL |
| Same figure, 2015 | 47.9m | SM.POP.TOTL |
| Mexico, remittances received as a share of GDP, 2025 | 3.5% | BX.TRF.PWKR.DT.GD.ZS |
Every figure here is computed from observations in this database and can be charted, downloaded or queried.
What this cannot show
This is context, not evidence, and the distinction matters more here than on any other note in this set. The paper's result is causal and identified from state-level variation in bracero dependence around a sharp policy change; nothing in these aggregates could test it. Migrant stock is also not migration: the World Bank series is a mid-year estimate interpolated between census rounds, so it counts presence rather than movement, and reading a change in it as a flow is the most common error made with this number. The refugee series that would have completed this picture has been archived by the World Bank and now needs UNHCR directly.
The data behind it
Personal remittances, received (% of GDP)
BX.TRF.PWKR.DT.GD.ZS
WBInternational migrant stock, total
SM.POP.TOTL