Migraciones

La pregunta es: escoge un (sólo uno) efecto de la inmigración internacional sobre los países de destino (no sobre los inmigrantes) y explícalo. Valora su importancia y destaca las diferencias o similitudes entre las dos globalizaciones (1820-1913 y 1945-2011) o a lo largo de la segunda globalización (1945-2011).


Economic Historians have recognized the second half of the nineteenth centuryas the period of first globalization when capital, people, goods and services travelled and converged across the world. In 1914 with the onset of World War I this converging period came to a halt and a second globalization wave began after World War II (O´Rourke, Williamson). In my answer I will compare the labor market effect of the mass immigration during these two periods on the country ofdestination. Generally speaking natives of immigrant receiving countries fear that their employment opportunities are reduced when immigrants arrive to their country, Also natives fear that immigrants will lower wages because they will be willing to work for lower salaries. Many research studies have been conducted on the effects of immigrants on the labor market, they mostly agree that the effects arenegative but only very slightly because countries have a great capacity to absorb new workers (Okkerse).

In the first globalization period immigrants went mostly from Europe to the United States, Australia, Argentina, Brazil and Canada. The United States received about two thirds of the immigrants. The effect on the destination countries was quite positive because these countries were notdensely populated and had many resources waiting to be exploited. Another reason these countries were able to absorb and benefit from the influx of workers was because capital and investments went to these countries during the same period. The wages of the natives was not substantially lowered by the mass arrival of new workers. As Eichengreen and Gemery point out in their article, they analyze thewage distribution of immigrants and native citizens of the state of Iowa at the end of the nineteenth century. The conventional thought argued that immigrants´ wages were as high, if not higher, than those of the native population throughout the United States during the wave of immigration in the second half of the nineteenth century. The authors challenge this view and moreover analyze thespecific characteristics that impacted wage distribution. They identify three such characteristics, the quantity of previous skill, the quality of skill and the effect of age. These all influenced the opportunities and the salaries of immigrant workers. The authors conclude that in fact immigrants had a lower wage than their native counterparts and that the unskilled immigrant worker had an even lowerwage, although the gap was to a certain degree closed with training, experience and assimilation. Although part of the reason natives´ wages were not affected was the segmentation of the immigrants in specific sectors of the economy and also the intra-national migration of natives in the United States mostly from the east coast to the west coast in the nineteenth century.

In the second half ofthe twentieth century immigration was different in some respects. Europe became a destination rather than a place of origin for immigrants, The United States although still the main destination did reduce greatly the number of immigrants it received. In this period Hatton explains a similar pattern of wage distribution as in the nineteenth century. Immigrants had lower salaries than natives andtended to converge with time and assimilation. The effect on the labor market is also significantly low in this period. In the twentieth century the economies of destination countries were more diversified and less concentrated in specific regions which in turn reduce the impact on the labor market. However it is important to note that the effects are different depending on the population density...