摘要：Immigration to the UK has risen in the past 10 years and has had a measurable
effect on the supply of different types of labour. But, existing studies of the
impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers in the UK (e.g.
Dustmann, Fabbri and Preston, 2005) have failed to find any significant effect.
This is something of a puzzle since Card and Lemieux, (2001) have shown that
changes in the relative supply of educated natives do seem to have measurable
effects on the wage structure. This paper offers a resolution of this puzzle –
natives and immigrants are imperfect substitutes, so that an increase in
immigration reduces the wages of immigrants relative to natives. We show this
using a pooled time series of British cross-sectional micro data of observations
on male wages and employment from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s. This lack of
substitution also means that there is little discernable effect of increased
immigration on the wages of native-born workers.
