| Sumario: | Although the earnings gap between immigrants and native high school dropouts remained practically unchanged between 1979 and 1989, it increased significantly in areas of high immigration. In the last decade, the immigrant-to-native high school dropout earnings gap remained more or less constant at approximately 93 percent in the United States as a whole. These overall figures hide significant declines in the immigrant-to-native wage ratios across regions of varying levels of immigration. At the national level, the greater proportion of low-skilled immigrants in the labor force accounts for a mere 4 percent of the decline in wages of low-skilled workers. In areas of high immigration, however, the increased proportion of immigrants in the low-skilled workforce accounts for approximately 43 percent of the wage decline.
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