Department of Economics, UCSD

The paper studies whether immigration affects the probability of high school graduation of American-born minorities. Since both the costs and the benefits of education are likely to rise due to immigration, the direction of the impact is ambiguous. The paper uses pooled 1980 and 1990 Census data to test for a link. State fixed effect estimates suggest a negative and significant impact of immigrants on the probability of completing high school for native-born blacks and Hispanics. The results are robust to use of metropolitan fixed effects, controlling for the pupil-teacher ratio in the state, and removing those who have recently moved. The results for blacks are also robust to removal of observations from California. However, the results for Hispanic natives depend crucially on the inclusion of the Californian subsample