Abstract
The Trump administration has put immigration reform at the forefront of its 2016 agenda. To protect American workers, this reform has reduced the number of Mexican Immigrants allowed into the United States. The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of Mexican Immigrants on the wages of native low-skilled workers, and testing whether this immigration is truly unfavorable to America’s low-skilled labor force. Because Mexican immigration begane to surge in the 1980s and 1990s, we examine the period 1980 through 210, using data from Integrated Public Use Microdata Samples (IPUMS) of the US Decennial Census data. We construct a pooled OLS model and find that natives do see a small percentage decrease in low-skilled wage across our time sequence. However, Mexican Immigrants experience a larger decrease in wages comparatively.
