Effect of Nurse Immigration on Employment and Earnings of U.S. Nurses

Researchers disagree about how competition from immigrant workers affects the economic well-being of native workers. Neeraj Kaushal and Robert Kaestner will address this question by studying individual level-data on registered nurses in the thirty largest metropolitan regions of the United States. Because they intend to restrict their analysis to a single occupation, Kaushal and Kaestner will be able to surmount many of the empirical difficulties that have plagued this line of research in the past. For example, the research design allows the investigators to measure direct competition between native and foreign born workers with similar skills. The investigators can also exploit changes in immigration policies specifically pertaining to nurses, which may help explain immigration patterns that are independent of changes in the job market. Kaushal and Kaestner will use data on nurses’ earnings and employment drawn from a variety of sources including the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses, which contains information on 17,000 nurses. Taking a variety of variables into account, they will calculate the total impact of immigration on the job market for domestic nurses – as measured by wages and levels of employment in nursing. The investigators will report their results at conferences and in several National Bureau of Economics Research working papers.