This paper studies the effects of immigration on the wages of Argentinean native
workers over the period 1993-2012. I use a novel micro-dataset which combines
household surveys from Argentina and six other Latin American countries.
Immigration from these six countries accounts for 95% of the total immigration
from Latin American countries. The empirical strategy identifies the effects of
the labour supply variation using the “national approach” from Borjas (2003) and
a reduced form equation obtained within a CES framework. In order to account
for demand/pull shocks, I propose a set of instruments based on labour market
conditions in immigrants’ home countries. An alternative specification also
explores the hypothesis of heterogeneous impact by country of origin. Overall,
findings show a significant negative impact of immigration on wages. IV
estimates suggest that OLS results are a lower bound for the (partial) causal
effect. Thus, if confounding demand factors exist, they bias the results toward
zero.