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7Labor Market Flooding? Migrant Destination andWage Change during America’s Age of MassMigrationSusan B. CarterUniversity of California, RiversideRichard SutchUniversity of California, RiversideInfluential voices in the media and in public policy circles have sustainedthe impression and perhaps heightened the concern that high levels ofimmigration harm resident Americans by reducing their wages. Thisperception of “labor market flooding” – sometimes billed as “commonsense” (Brimelow 1995) – is bolstered by the logic of introductory-levelmicroeconomic theory. That analysis begins by assuming a downwardslopingdemand curve for labor in a static labor market. Under suchcircumstances, an immigration-induced outward shift in the labor supplycurve will cause the equilibrium wage to fall. George Borjas emphasizedthis logic in the title of a recent paper, “The Labor Demand Curve isDownward Sloping” (Borjas 2003).Nonetheless, an impressive number of empirical studies based on recentdata find no evidence of a negative impact of immigration on residentwages. At the conclusion of a survey of the literature published in 1995,Rachel M. Friedberg and Jennifer Hunt report:Despite the popular belief that immigrants have a large adverseimpact on the wages and employment opportunities of thenative-born population, the literature on this question doesnot provide much support for this conclusion. … [E]mpiricalestimates in a variety of settings and using a variety ofapproaches have shown that the effect of immigration onthe labor market outcomes of natives is small. There is noevidence of economically significant reductions in nativeemployment. Most empirical analysis of the United States andother countries finds that a 10 percent increase in the fraction131