ACDE seminar: Seasonal work visas and the wages, employment, and mobility of incumbent workers

This seminar shares new evidence on the impacts of low-skilled immigration in Australia from administrative data.  

We examine the effects of the uncapped, employer-sponsored Seasonal Worker Program on Australian workers' wages, employment, and mobility. Using comprehensive tax and visa records and a difference-in-differences approach around the program's announcement, we find no evidence that the Seasonal Worker Program suppressed average earnings or employment in exposed regions. This result holds across various robustness checks, including analyses with unbalanced and balanced panels, event studies, and occupation-based (i.e., skill-cell approach) and triple-difference estimates. We do, however, find clear evidence of heterogeneous impacts across specific sub-groups, including young men. Examining regional and occupational mobility as potential margins of adjustment, we find that (a) incumbent workers in exposed regions are more likely to move to other regions but not to major urban centres, (b) exposed regions are less likely to receive inward internal migrants, and (c) incumbent workers in the most exposed occupations are significantly more likely to change occupations, predominantly to higher-skill jobs and thus representing significant income gains for these Australian workers.