Does
Immigration Hurt African-American Self-Employment?
Robert
W. Fairlie and Bruce D. Meyer
Abstract
Previous studies tend to find that immigration has
a weak negative effect on the employment and earnings of native-born
workers. These studies generally overlook the effect of immigration
on an important sector of the labor force, the self-employed. Anecdotal
evidence suggests that immigrants, especially those from Asian countries,
may displace black-owned business owners. We use Census of Population
microdata to examine if black self-employment levels are lower in
labor markets which have a higher share of immigrants. We define
labor markets as metropolitan areas (MAs) and use the variation
across 94 MAs in the U.S. to examine the relationship between black
self-employment and immigration in both 1980 and 1990. To control
for permanent differences across MAs in other influences, we also
estimate the effect of the change in immigration from 1980 to 1990
on the change in black self-employment over this period. We generally
find that immigration has no effect or only a modest negative effect
on black male or female self-employment. These findings do not change
if we weight our measure of immigration by the propensity of immigrant
groups to be self-employed or if we limit our sample of immigrants
to those from only Asian countries. With only a few exceptions,
our findings are quite robust to alternative estimation techniques
and specifications.
Robert W. Fairlie, Department
of Economics, University of California, Santa Cruz Bruce D. Meyer, Department of Economics,
Northwestern University
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