Giovanni Peri and Vasco Yasenov’s immigration research featured in the Wall Street Journal and the Economist
The Wall Street Journal and The Economist covered recent research by Giovanni Peri and Vasco Yasenov as part of a debate over the impact of immigration on local wages. Using the Mariel boatlift as a natural experiment, Peri and Yasenov find little to no impact of immigration on local wages while another researcher, George Borjas, uses the same data and finds that immigration depresses local wages. In the Wall Street Journal article, Peri explains why.
Peri added that, "Dr. Borjas was too eager to draw conclusions from extremely small samples of male, non-Hispanic, high-school dropouts in Miami—amounting to fewer than two dozen people in most years of survey data... We all know it is crazy to try to say what happened to wages in a city based only on 20 people, the measurement error is such that it essentially swamps anything else."