Previous research finds that the greater geographic mobility of foreign than native-born workers facilitates labor market adjustment to shifting regional economic conditions. We examine immigration's role in enabling U.S. commuting zones to respond to manufacturing job loss caused by import competition from China. Although foreign-born population headcounts fell by a larger proportion than those of the native-born in trade-exposed regions, the contribution of immigration to labor market adjustment in this episode was small. Because most U.S. immigrants arrived in the country after manufacturing regions were already mature, few took jobs in industries that later saw import surges. The foreign-born population share in regions with high trade exposure was only three-fifths that in regions with low exposure. Immigration may do more to aid adjustment to cyclical shocks, in which job loss follows recent hiring booms, than to aid adjustment to secular decline, in which hiring booms occurred longer ago.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.