Immigration Raised US Innovation and Wages

A new AER paper uses a cross‑county, ancestry‑by‑inflow identification strategy to isolate exogenous immigration shocks and finds immigration causally increases local innovation and wages over a five‑year horizon. Its structural model estimates that immigration to the United States since 1965 may have raised aggregate innovation and wages by about 5 percent. — If robust, this quantifies a positive long‑run economic effect of immigration and sharpens arguments about the costs and benefits of immigration policy.