Immigration is driven by employer demand for low-wage labor, not migrant choice

Evidence

Dual labor market theory focuses on structural demand for low-skilled labor in developed economies. Labor markets become segmented, with local workers in highly developed economies gaining the education and skills needed for qualified jobs, and being unwilling to do unrewarding, monotonous, and poorly paid work. The result is recruitment of unskilled immigrant workers by employers and governments. This intensifies labor market segmentation, since ethnicity, race, national origins, and gender are used as labels to assign workers to certain jobs. Migration is seen as “demand-driven” by powerful groups in the receiving countries, rather than “supply-driven” by the income-maximizing behavior of migrants (Piore, 1980). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3832

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to segmented labor market theory and echoes the reader’s interest in how social structures pattern economic outcomes, as in the Milgrom law-merchant material. — connects to: Immigration and the cash nexus created America’s wage-labor force — Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America:…, 613