Nobel Prize for economist who was father of open border migration policies

David Card showed that large waves of unskilled immigration do not undermine local workers’ job prospects or wages

An economist who used real-world events to show that large waves of low-skilled immigration did not undermine wages and job prospects for local workers has been honoured with a share of this year’s economics Nobel prize.

David Card, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, won one half of the award, formally called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, “for his empirical contributions to labour economics”.

One of his most famous papers is a study, published in 1990, of the impact of the Mariel Boatlift, in which 125,000 Cubans arrived in Miami in 1980.

Half of them settled in the Floridian city, amounting to a 7pc increase in the workforce.

Despite conventional expectations that this would undercut existing workers, the study found “the influx of Mariel immigrants had virtually no effect on the wage rates of less-skilled nonCuban workers”.

“Similarly, there is no evidence of an increase in unemployment among less-skilled blacks or other non-Cuban workers.”

The study provided real-world evidence supporting the economic theory that new workers are both a source of supply and demand, thus boosting growth without undermining local employment.

Such work gave intellectual clout to open borders policies.


The committee awarding the prize also pointed to Professor Card’s work on minimum wages. He examined another “natural experiment” - in this case a hike in pay in the US state of New Jersey but not neighbouring Pennsylvania - and showed no fall in employment despite the higher staffing costs.

Professor Card said: “My contributions are pretty modest.”

He added: “Most old-fashioned economists are very theoretical, but these days, a large fraction of economics is really very nuts-and-bolts, looking at subjects like education or health, or at the effects of immigration or the effects of wage policies. These are really very, very simple things. So, my big contribution was to oversimplify the field.”

The remaining half of the 10m Swedish kronor (£840,000) prize was split between Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens, professors of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University respectively.

Peter Fredriksson, chair of the Economic Sciences Prize Committee, said: “Angrist and Imbens’ methodological contributions have shown that natural experiments are a rich source of knowledge,” citing their studies of policy changes including the extension of compulsory education for school pupils.

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