Research notes · Migration

Why has the wage gap between immigrants and natives widened for each successive arrival cohort?

What the authors found

Albert, Glitz and Llull show that immigrant wage assimilation depends not only on individual skill accumulation but on labour market equilibrium. When immigrants and natives are imperfect substitutes, further immigrant inflows widen the wage gap between them — so each cohort's progress is partly undone by the arrival of the next. This competition channel explains about a fifth of the increase in the average immigrant-native wage gap across US arrival cohorts since the 1960s, rising to about a third once relative demand shifts are included.

What our data adds

The stock of foreign-born residents in the United States has kept rising through the period this mechanism operates over: 47.9 million in 2015, 50.5 million in 2020, 52.4 million in 2024. On the authors' account this is not a neutral backdrop to assimilation but an input into it — every increment adds competition for the cohorts already present. The measure that matters for their argument is the flow of new arrivals rather than the stock, and the stock's steady rise is the accumulated trace of it.

What this cannot show

Migrant stock is an interpolated mid-year estimate, not an arrival count, so it cannot supply the cohort structure the paper is built on — and a rising stock is compatible with falling arrivals if fewer people leave. Wages, skills and substitutability are all absent from this database. The three data points above are a scale for the phenomenon, not evidence about it.

The data behind it

Related notes

• If you shut a border to protect domestic workers, do their wages actually rise?
• When seven million people arrive at once, who gains and who loses?
• If firms cannot hire foreign workers for low-skill jobs, do they hire local ones instead?

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