The Impact of the Mariel Boatlift on the Miami Labor Market
David Card
Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 43, No. 2. (Jan., 1990), pp. 245-257. Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0019-7939%28199001%2943%3A2%3C245%3ATIOTMB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Z
Industrial and Labor Relations Review is currently published by Cornell University, School of Industrial & Labor Relations.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/cschool.html.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.
The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
http://www.jstor.org Wed Jun 27 22:35:26 2007
THE IMPACT OF THE MARIEL BOATLIFT ON THE MIAMI LABOR MARKET
DAVID CARD*
Using data from the Current Population Survey, this paper describes the effect of the Marie1Boatlift of 1980on the Miami labor market. The Marie1 immigrants increased the Miami labor force by 7%, and the percentage increase in labor supply to less-skilled occupations and industries was even greater because most of the immigrants were relatively unskilled. Nevertheless, the Marie1 influx appears to have had virtually no effect on the wages or unemployment rates of less-skilled workers, even among Cubans who had immigrated earlier. The author suggests that the ability of Miami’s labor market to rapidly absorb the Marie1 immigrants was largely owing to its adjustment to other large waves of immigrants in the two decades before the Marie1 Boatlift.
0NE of the chief concerns of immigra- tion policy-makers is the extent to which immigrants depress the labor mar- ket opportunities of less-skilled natives. Despite the presumption that an influx of
immigrants will substantially reduce native wages, existing empirical studies suggest that the effect is small. (See the survey by Greenwood and McDowell [I9861 and studies by Grossman [1982], Borjas [1987], and Lalonde and Tope1 [1987].)There are two leading explanations for this finding. First, immigrants have, on average, only slightly lower skills than the native popu- lation. Thus, econometric studies based on the distribution of the existing stock of immigrants probably understate the effect of unskilled immigration on less-skilled
T h e author is Professor o f Economics, Princeton Cniversity. He thanks George Borjas, Alan Krueger, Bruce Meyer, and seminar participants at Princeton University for their comments.
A data appendix with copies of the computer programs used to generate the tables in this paper is available from the author at the Industrial Relations Section, Firestone Library, Princeton University, Princeton, S J 08544.
natives. Second, the locational choices of immigrants and natives presumably de- pend on expected labor market opportu- nities. Immigrants tend to move to cities where the growth in demand for labor can accommodate their supply. Even if new immigrants cluster in only a few cities (as they do in the United States), inter-city migration of natives will tend to offset the adverse effects of immigration.
These considerations illustrate the diffi-
culty of using the correlation across cities
between wages and immigrant densities to
measure the effect of immigration on the
labor market opportunities of natives. They also underscore the value of a natural ex- periment that corresponds more closely to an exogenous increase in the supply of im- migrants to a particular labor market.
T h e experiences of the Miami labor market in the aftermath of the Marie1 Boatlift form one such experiment. From Mav to Se~tember1980. some 125,000
1
Cuban immigrants arrived in Miami on a
flotilla of privately chartered boats. Their
arrival was the conseauence of an unlikelv
1
sequence of events culminating in Castro’s
Indu~trialand Labor Helnttons Reutew, Vol.43, So. 2 (January1990).0by Cornell University 0019-7939190/4302 $01.OO
,
”
246 INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR RELA TIONS REVIEW
declaration on April 20, 1980, that Cubans wishing to emigrate to the United States were free to leave from the port of Mariel.’ Fifty percent of the Marie1 immi- grants settled permanently in Miami. T h e result was a 7% increase in the labor force of Miami and a 20% increase in the number of Cuban workers in Miami.
Angeles, the city with the next-highest immigrant fraction, and 6.1% nationwide. At the time of the Census, 56% of immigrants in Miami were of Cuban origin. T h e remaining foreign-born resi- dents, who accounted for 16% of the Miami population, included other His- panic groups and a broad selection of Caribbean and European nationals.
This paper summarizes the effects of
the Boatlift on the Miami labor market,
focusing on wages and unemployn~ent lation. The fraction of black residents was
rates of less-skilled workers. T h e analysis is based on individual micro-data for 1979-85 from the merged outgoing rota- tion group samples of the Current Popu- lation Survey (CPS).
Three features of the Marie1 incident and the .Census data greatly facilitate the analysis. First, the CPS sample of the Miami metropolitan area is relatively large: roughly 1,200 individuals per month. Second, a comprehensive picture of the Miami labor market in the months just before the Marie1 Boatlift is available from the 1980 Census, which was conducted on April 1, 1980. Finally, unlike most other ethnic groups, Cubans are separately identified in the CPS questionnaire. Thus, it is possible to estimate wage rates, unemployment rates, and other economic indicators for both Cubans and non- Cubans in the Miami labor market, and to measure the effects of the Marie1 immigra- tion on the two groups separately.
Overview of the Miami Labor Market Before the Boatlift
For at least a decade prior to the Marie1 Boatlift, Miami was the most immigrant- intensive city in the country. Tabulations from the 1980 Census indicate that 35.5% of residents in the Miami Standard Metro- politan Statistical Area (SMSA) were for- eign-born,2 compared to 22.3% in Los
‘See Masud-Piloto (1988, chaps. 6-7) for an overview of the political developments that led to the Mariel Boatlift.
See U.S. Department of Commerce (1983). The Miami SMSA consists of Dade County, and includes Miami City as well as a number of smaller towns and cities. Throughout this paper, I use “hIia~ni”to refer to this broader geographic region.
15.0%in 1970 and had increased to 17.3% by the time of the 1980 Census. T h e large concentrations of both immigrants and blacks makes Miami ideal for studying the effect of increased immigration on the labor market opportunities of black na- tives.
Table 1 describes the four major groups in the Miami labor force in 1979: white non-Hispanics; black non-Hispanics; Cu- bans (foreign-born and native-born); and other Hispanics. For simplicity, I have restricted attention to individuals age 16-6 1, a group that represents roughly 60% of the Miami population. T h e frac- tions of Cubans and blacks in the 16-61 age group are 27.2% and 26.3%, respec- tively, and the fractions of white non- Hispanics and non-Cuban Hispanics are 34.4% and 11.1%. Overall. 73% of 16- 61-year-olds participated in the labor force, with somewhat higher rates among whites and Cubans and lower rates among blacks and other Hispanics. Education levels in Miami are somewhat below the national average: the mean of completed education for 16-6 1-year-olds in 1979 was
11.8 years in Miami, compared with 12.2 vears nationwide.
i
T h e occupation distributions in rows
7-17 of Table 1 give a crude indication of
the degree of labor market competition
among the four groups. Cubans and other
Hispanics have very similar occupation
distributions, with a higher representation
in craft and operative occupations than
either whites or blacks. Blacks are more
h i ~ h l vconcentrated in laborer and service-
related occupations, and are significantly under-represented in managerial occupa- tions.
A useful summary measure of the
Miami also has a significant black popu-
0,
overlau in the occ~~natiodnistributions of the different groups is the average per- cent illcrease in labox supply in occupa- tions held bv one group that would result from a one percentage point increase In the 01 etall f~actioro~f workers in a second e r o u ~ , .T~his lrldex has the simule form
I
The Marie1Immigration
Due to the unauthorized nature of the Boatlift, no exact count of the number of Marie1 immigrants is available, and there is little precise information on the charac- teristics or final destinations of tlie immi- grants. This section summarizes some of the available information, including data from the March 1983 Mobility Supple- ment to the Current Population Survey, which allows Marie1 immigrants to be distinguished from other Cubans.
Most sources estimate the number- of Marie1 immigrants at between 120,000 and 125,000. A recent Census Bureau report (1J.S. Department of C~’ ornmerce 1988:9) states that 126,000 refugees en- tered the LJnited States as “Cuban En- trant,~”(the special immigration status awarded to the Marie1 refugees) between April 1980 and June 1981. Based on the settlement of earlier Cubans, it is widely assumed that about oile-half of these refugees settled permalently in Miami. The Census Bureau “Experimen- tal County Population Estimates” file
”
C,s,,r,, / c,, where s?, is the fraction of
\corkers of group 1 in occupatio~jl, ,,s is the fractioc of workers of vrouD 2 in
” occupation 1, and s, is the fraction of all
workers in occupation J . Based on the distrib~itioris in Table 1, an inflow of immigrants resulting in a one percentage point increase in the fraction of Cubans in Miami xvould lead to a weighted average increase of .95% in the si~pplyof labor to occupations held by whites. Under the same conditions the increase would be .99% for blacks, 1.025% for non-Cuban Hispanics, and 1.065%for Cubans them- selves. These calculations suggest that the overlap bet,ween the occupational djstribu- tioris of t!le four groups is relatively high.
5 -rhi4 irlclex is derived in Altonji and Card (1989: 15-16).
THE MARIEL BOATLIFT
Tnble 7. Characteristics of 16-61-Year-Olds in Miami, 1979.
Chnracterictic
Chamcl