Overlooked Success Story
"U.S. Wage-Inequality Trends and Recent Immigration" by Robert I. Lerman, in The American Economic Review (May 1999), American Economic Assn., 2014 Broadway, Ste. 305, Nashville, Tenn. 37203.
"U.S. Wage-Inequality Trends and Recent Immigration" by Robert I. Lerman, in The American Economic Review (May 1999), American Economic Assn., 2014 Broadway, Ste. 305, Nashville, Tenn. 37203.
"U.S. Wage-Inequality Trends and Recent Immigration" by Robert I. Lerman, in The American Economic Review (May 1999), American Economic Assn., 2014 Broadway, Ste. 305, Nashville, Tenn. 37203.
Economists have been sounding the alarm in recent years about a broad increase in earnings inequality. Though Lerman, an American University economist, has argued that no such increase took place after 1986 (see WQ, Summer 1998, p. 126), there has been little, if any, disagreement that wage inequality increased between 1979 and the mid-1980s. Until now. Lerman insists that something important has been left out of earlier assessments: the impact of immigration. In 1996, about seven percent of the U.S. labor force consisted of immigrants who had arrived during the previous 16 years, mostly from low-wage countries. To economists gauging income inequality, Lerman argues, things look worse than they should, because these low-income folk don’t show up in their 1979 base year measurements. But they do appear in later measurements, dragging the averages down.