IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/crm/wpaper/2224.html

The effect of low-skill immigration restrictions on US firms and workers: Evidence from a randomized lottery

Author

Listed:
  • Michael A. Clemens

    (Center for Global Development)

  • Ethan G. Lewis

    (Dartmouth College)

Abstract

The U.S. limits work visas for low-skill jobs outside of agriculture, with a binding quota that firms access via a randomized lottery. We evaluate the marginal impact of the quota on firms entering the 2021 H-2B visa lottery using a novel survey and pre-analysis plan. Firms exogenously authorized to employ more immigrants significantly increase production (elasticity +0.16) with no decrease or an increase in U.S. employment (elasticity +0.10, statistically imprecise) across several pre-registered subsamples. The results imply very low substitutability of native for foreign labor in the policy-relevant occupations. Forensic analysis suggests similarly low substitutability of black-market labor.

Suggested Citation

  • Michael A. Clemens & Ethan G. Lewis, 2022. "The effect of low-skill immigration restrictions on US firms and workers: Evidence from a randomized lottery," RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series 2224, ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin).
    • Handle: RePEc:crm:wpaper:2224
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cream-migration.org/publ_uploads/CDP_24_22.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Silliman, Mikko & Willén, Alexander, 2024. "Worker Power, Immigrant Sorting, and Firm Dynamics," Discussion Paper Series in Economics 13/2024, Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Economics.
    2. Thiemo Fetzer & Christina Palmou & Jakob Schneebacher, 2024. "How Do Firms Cope with Economic Shocks in Real Time?," ECONtribute Discussion Papers Series 337, University of Bonn and University of Cologne, Germany.
    3. Jeremias Nieminen & Sanni Kiviholma & Ohto Kanninen & Hannu Karhunen, 2024. "Regulating Labor Immigration: The Effects of Lifting Labor Market Testing," Working Papers 344, Työn ja talouden tutkimus LABORE, The Labour Institute for Economic Research LABORE.
    4. Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes & Esther Arenas-Arroyo & Parag Mahajan & Bernhard Schmidpeter, 2023. "Low-wage jobs, foreign-born workers, and firm performance," Economics working papers 2023-10, Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
    5. Christian Dustmann & Uta Schoenberg, 2025. "Linking Empirical Evidence to Theory: A Framework for Understanding Immigrations Labor Market Effects," RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series 2522, ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • F22 - International Economics - - International Factor Movements and International Business - - - International Migration
    • J61 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers
    • D22 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior: Empirical Analysis

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:crm:wpaper:2224. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Moritz Lubczyk or Matthew Nibloe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cmucluk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.