How did the Miami labor market absorb the Mariel immigrants?
Author InfoEthan Lewis Abstract Card’s (1990) well-known analysis of the Mariel boatlift concluded that this mass influx of mostly less-skilled Cubans to Miami had little impact on the labor market outcomes of the city’s less-skilled workers. This paper evaluates two explanations for this. First, consistent with an open-economy framework, this paper asks whether after the boatlift, Miami increased its production of unskilled-intensive manufactured goods, allowing it to “export” the impact of the boatlift. Second, this paper asks whether Miami adapted to the boatlift by implementing new skill-complementary technologies more slowly than would have otherwise been the case. Using a confidential micro data version of the Annual Surveys of Manufactures, I show that following the boatlift, Miami’s relative output of different manufacturing industries trended similarly to other cities with similar pre-boatlift trends in manufacturing mix. The response of industry mix to the boatlift therefore
