We examine how immigration affects natives’ relative prime-age labor market outcomes by economic class background, with class background established on the basis of parents’ earnings rank. Exploiting alternative sources of variation in immigration patterns across time and space, we find that immigration from low-income countries reduces intergenerational mobility and thus steepens the social gradient in natives’ labor market outcomes, whereas immigration from high-income countries levels it. These findings are robust with respect to a wide range of identifying assumptions. The analysis is based on high-quality population-wide administrative data from Norway, which is one of the rich-world countries with the most rapid rise in the immigrant population share over the past two decades. Our findings suggest that immigration can explain a considerable part of the observed relative decline in economic performance among natives with a lower-class background.

我们研究了移民如何通过经济阶层背景影响当地人的相对壮年劳动力市场结果，阶层背景是根据父母的收入排名建立的。利用跨时间和空间的移民模式变化的替代来源，我们发现来自低收入国家的移民降低了代际流动性，从而使当地人劳动力市场结果的社会梯度变得陡峭，而来自高收入国家的移民则将其拉平。这些发现在广泛的识别假设方面是可靠的。该分析基于来自挪威的高质量全人口行政数据，挪威是过去二十年移民人口份额增长最快的富裕国家之一。