Do skilled immigrants affect the wage rate of Australian workers?

Abstract

We hypothesise that skilled immigration increases the wage rate in Australia. Our alternative hypothesis is that skilled immigration decreases the wage rate in Australia. The data used for this research comes from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Department of Immigration and

Citizenship. Based on our analysis, we find that there is positive relationship between high-skilled immigration and employee earnings per hour.

We also find that low-skilled immigrants have a negative effect on employee earnings per hour. We believe that low-skilled workers are easily replaced such that low-skilled immigrants are substitutes to Australian low-skilled workers. However, there are some limitations of our research. Notably, our result are restricted to three occupations.