Immigration and Unemployment?

Question

Hello everyone

I am finding alot of articles that state that immigration does not have a negative relationship with unemployment. However, Im very confused as to how they come to this conclusion. What kind of methods would be used to come by this conclusion? Surveys, field research, experiments, available data?

They have mention some terms which I think they have used to measure this issue. Here's an example of what the articles say:

"Bidirectional Causality Test finds no evidence of a significant effect of immigration on employment."

"Co-integration tests indicate no observed increase in aggregate unemployment due to immigration in the long run"

"Result from causality test based on vector error correction model, confirms that in the short run, past unemployment does cause less immigration rates, but not vice versa."

Does anyone know what co-integration tests are?Or Bidirectional Causality Test?OR the Vector error correction model?What methods categories would these fall under?

Answer 1

As far as how they are coming up with this data its likely that its a combination of things like surveys or field research, but most probably it comes from available data. Things like immigration and unemployment are pretty well charted by different groups of people so it would not be difficult to get that information as its usually pretty easily accessable.

Some those things you are hung up on are statistical measures in order to sort out their data sets. Something like a bidirectional casuality test is likely to be used to try and figure out if either one of those things is causing the other (is immigration causing unemployment or is unemployment causing immigration). Its a similar type of thing with co-integration, though it probably uses a different process. Things like significant effect are stastical measures that are pretty standard across empirical research that use things like p values which might be hard to understand without a background in statistics.

As far as that last quote, once they cross checked some of their statistics they found that essentially in a short enough time span if unemployment is high, immigration will be lower, but not over a long enough time span.

When trying to sift through some of the technical jargon i would focus on things like the results and discussion as your going to get closer to what you actually want to know.

Personally i think it makes sense that immigration and unemployment do not have much of a causal relationship.

Answer 2

i think they test and watch two variable

they see the years immigration peaks, and match it if unemployment also peaks (maybe they give it a few year, i dont have the details)

the only thing immigration changes is the % of those uneducated, and this puts pressure on low paying jobs since middle class citizens now need to compete with immigrates

of course immigrates accept lower paying jobs