This book collects the main papers written by George Borjas on the economics of immigration during a decades-long career. Although there was little interest in immigration issues among economists before the 1980s, the literature has exploded since. The essays collected in this book represent some of the contributions that helped build the foundations of immigration economics. The essays cover a wide range of topics, including the assimilation of immigrants, the skill characteristics of the immigrant population, the intergenerational progress of immigrant households, the measurement of the impact of immigrants on the labor markets of receiving countries, and the calculation of the economic benefits from immigration. The essays included in this volume continue to be widely cited and have often set the research agenda for subsequent research on immigration in both receiving and sending countries.

"This provocative and carefully researched book will create a lot of waves. In well written and engaging prose, George Borjas addresses some difficult questions and bravely provides some difficult answers to issues that America as a nation must confront. "Heaven's Door" will be controversial, but it will be by far the best and most important source document for the coming national debate on the Second Great Migration."--William Julius Wilson, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Harvard University

"A new book by George Borjas always provides original and honest insights that help us better understand immigration's impact on our country."Heaven's Door" breaks important new ground on the social mobility of immigrants and their children and on the causes of the recent decline of immigrants' skills relative to those of natives. At the same time, it updates Borjas's work of the past decade on the costs and benefits of immigration. No one interested in the consequences of American immigration policy, present or proposed, should be without a well-worn copy."--U.S. Representative Lamar Smith

"The steady, thoughtful work of George Borjas has had a profound impact on the always emotional debate over immigration policy in the United States. The present nature of the national immigration debate would be different indeed were it not for Borjas's work. This book may well be controversial, but its clarity, sincerity, and relevance for anyone fascinated with immigration issues is rock solid."--Alan Simpson, U.S. Senator (Wyo.), Retired

"George Borjas has written a well-reasoned and well-documented book on the costs and benefits of immigration for the American economy. He offersimaginative proposals for reforms in immigration policies that deserve serious attention."--James J. Heckman, University of Chicago

"George Borjas has nearly single-handedly turned the economic study of immigration into a respectable and heavily researched topic. Like all his other work on the subject, this book is important reading and maybe even more valuable because it is accessible to anyone with a serious interest in the subject."--Orley Ashenfelter, Joseph Douglas Green 1895 Professor of Economics, Princeton University

"Borjas is the leading American economist today writing about immigration policy. I do not share all of his views, but they have to be taken seriously by everyone in the field, and indeed his research has shaped the field more than that of any other writer."--John Isbister, University of California, Santa Cruz

The population of the United States is highly mobile. Since the 1960s, approximately three percent of the population moves across state lines in any given year, and 10 percent of the population moves across state lines in a five-year period. In view of the falling fertility rates of American women, this extensive mobility implies that migration has become an increasingly important source of demographic change in the various regions and a major determinant of concurrent changes in regional economic growth.

Millions of people--nearly 3 percent of the world's population--no longer live in the country where they were born. Every day, migrants enter not only the United States but also developed countries without much of a history of immigration. Some of these nations have switched in a short span of time from being the source of immigrants to being a destination for them. International migration is today a central subject of research in modern labor economics, which seeks to put into perspective and explain this historic demographic transformation.

Immigration Economics "synthesizes the theories, models, and econometric methods used to identify the causes and consequences of international labor flows. Economist George Borjas lays out with clarity and rigor a full spectrum of topics, including migrant worker selection and assimilation, the impact of immigration on labor markets and worker wages, and the economic benefits and losses that result from immigration.

Two important themes emerge: First, immigration has distributional consequences: some people gain, but some people lose. Second, immigrants are rational economic agents who attempt to do the best they can with the resources they have, and the same holds true for native workers of the countries that receive migrants. This straightforward behavioral proposition, Borjas argues, has crucial implications for how economists and policymakers should frame contemporary debates over immigration.

The branch of economics concerned with the allocation of resources in the labor market addresses some of the most difficult issues facing governments and policy-makers at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The range of dizzying questions it seeks to answer include: what is the impact of immigration on the wage and employment opportunities of native-born workers? are government subsidies of investments in human capital an effective way to improve the economic well-being of disadvantaged workers? what factors determine the distribution of wages? what is the economic impact of trade unions? why did the labor-force participation of women rise steadily throughout the past century in many industrialized countries? In addition to its policy relevance, labor economics has played an important role in the development of modern economics as a whole. Because of the widespread availability of data on labor-market outcomes, labor economists have developed a number of econometric methods that have profoundly influenced the profession. The diffusion of these methods to other fields within economics (and to other social sciences) has radically changed how social scientists analyse and interpret data. This new title from Routledge meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of the subject's vast literature and the continuing explosion in research. Edited by George J. Borjas, the pre-eminent scholar in the field, The Economics of Labor is a four-volume collection of classic and contemporary contributions. The first volume is dedicated to the basic models of labor supply and labor demand. Volume II, meanwhile, focuses on studies of labor-market equilibrium, including the theory of compensating differentials. The third and fourth volumes bring together a number of related topics, including labor-market discrimination, labor-market unions, migration, theories of incentives and compensation, and unemployment. Together, the four volumes provide a one-stop resource for all interested researchers, teachers, and students to gain a thorough understanding of the roots of labor economics and its future direction. With a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, The Economics of Labor is destined to be valued by all economists, as well as by other social scientists working in related areas, as an essential work of reference.