Opinion | Snoozing on Skilled Immigrant Labor

One canard about immigrants is that many come for the comforts of the welfare state. That’s not true of most newcomers, but it is true that excessive occupational licensing rules are too often a barrier for immigrants to work.

A new paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis finds that licensing regimes can especially “limit employment options for immigrants.” Authors Tyler Boesch, Michou Kokodoko and Ryan Nunn crunched data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey, which includes responses from immigrants regardless of their legal status. They find that “foreign-born workers are 7.7 percentage points less likely to be licensed than native-born workers.”