Immigration and Robots: Is the Absence of Immigrants Linked to the Rise of Automation?

• In Event: 2323 - Student Forum Refereed Roundtable
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 2. Housing and Immigration in a Global Context

Abstract

Increasing concerns about automation of work raise the question what the demographic components are that define the spread of technology. This paper seeks to address whether a greater immigrant population share can account for more or less automation. The case study of the Florida sugarcane producers shows that the availability of low-skilled foreign workers in agriculture, can diminish incentives to mechanize production aside from purely technological barriers, but only as long as their wages and organizing clout can be held down. The costly lawsuits for underpayment of wages in the early-1990s have changed the calculus for producers, who eagerly sought for means of automating the work. The case study of foreign guestworkers reveals a rather ambiguous image of how the presence of a foreign-born population affect automation. To identify a nationwide trend, the statistical analysis of immigrants and automation shows that US counties that have a higher share of the foreign-born population, especially from Latin American countries (but also from China and India), exhibit less robot exposure, which confirms the intuition that regions with more immigrants that concentrate more lower-skilled and higher-skilled workers with low wages and low organization clout provide employers with alternatives to robots.

Authors

• L. Larry Liu, Princeton University

• Alejandro Portes, Princeton University, Sociology, Emeritus