One canard about immigrants is that many come for the comforts of the welfare state. That’s not true of most newcomers, however it’s true that extreme occupational licensing guidelines are too typically a barrier for immigrants to work.
A brand new paper from the Federal Reserve Financial institution of Minneapolis finds that licensing regimes can particularly “restrict employment choices for immigrants.” Authors Tyler Boesch, Michou Kokodoko and Ryan Nunn crunched information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Present Inhabitants Survey, which incorporates responses from immigrants no matter their authorized standing. They discover that “foreign-born employees are 7.7 proportion factors much less prone to be licensed than native-born employees.”
