Dude, Wheres My Job?The Impact of Immigration on the Youth Labor Market

Most studies about the labor market impact of immigration limit their analysis to the adult native population. This paper shows that teen employment is signi…cantly more responsive than adult employment to immigration, and that growth in low-skilled immigration appears to be an important cause of recent declines in teen employment rates. Using variation in immigrant shares across metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2000, I show that the impact of immigration on youth employment is at least twice as large as the impact on adults, and that immigration a¤ects school enrollment decisions and the type of jobs held by native youth. These e¤ects are strongest for black youth and youth from poorer and less educated families. The estimates suggest that a 10 percentage point increase in the immigrant share of a city’s low-skilled population reduces the teen employment rate by 5 percentage points, implying that up to half of the fall in teen employment between 1990 and 2005 can be explained by increased immigration. I am grateful to David Autor, Josh Angrist, and Jonathan Gruber, for their many helpful conversations and suggestions. I would also like to thank Neil Bhutta, Jim Berry, Hui Shan, Tonja Bowen, Tal Gross, Jeanne Lafortune, Konrad Menzel, and participants at MIT labor lunch seminars for valuable comments and suggestions. All errors are my own.