Discussion
The 83 percent of Thais who believe that immigration reduces local wages are, according
to our results, correct. Our preferred instrumental-variables specification, shown in
column 5 of Table 2, has a coefficient on migrant intensity of -0.0185. Contrary to
expectations, restricting the analysis to low-skilled workers gives essentially the same
result. Immigration seems, if anything, to have slightly raised employment rates, and to
have had no effect on hours worked.
There are a number of limitations to our analysis. Immigrants are clearly attracted to
districts with higher wages, which can bias our estimate towards zero. Instrumenting on
distance to the Myanmar border should have reduced this bias, but may not have removed
it completely. One interpretation of the apparent positive relationship between
immigration and employment rates is that we have not completely eliminated the effects
of endogeneity..