What Happens to the Careers of European Workers When Immigrants “Take Their Jobs”?

Abstract

Following a representative longitudinal sample of native European residents over the period 1995–2001, we identify the effect of the inflows of immigrants on natives’ career, employment, and wages. We control for individual, country-year, occupation group-year, and occupation group-country heterogeneity and shocks, and construct an imputed inflow of the foreign-born population that is exogenous to local demand shocks. We find that native European workers are more likely to move to occupations associated with higher skills and status when a larger number of immigrants enters their labor market. We find no evidence of an increase in their probability of becoming unemployed.