IN1980, FLORIDA experienced an immigration restrictionist’s worstnightmare: ahuge, rapid, and unauthorized influx of largely unskilled migrants.
That event was the Mariel boatlift, a mass migration that followed Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s April 1980 announcement that Cubans wishing to leave the country could do so. In just six months, 125,000 Cuban immigrants arrived in Florida, half of them settling in Miami.
“Observers in Miami at the time of the Boatlift noted the strain caused by the Mariel immigration,” wrote University of California, Berkeley, labor economist David Card in his highly influential (and contentious) 1990 paper on the boatlift. “Widespread joblessness of refugees throughout the summer of 1980 contributed to a perception that labor market opportunities for less-skilled natives were threatened by the Mariel immigrants.” The boatlift increased Miami’s labor force by a staggering 7 percent.
Politicians feared the worst. Bob Graham, who was then Florida’s Democratic governor, told Congress that his state could not “subsidize…undesirables.” With Florida communities forced to handle “an unduly harsh burden,” he said, the federal government needed to “take responsibility for expelling those individuals now.”
In retrospect, what happen to the labor market is one of the biggest lessons from the boatlift. It “had virtually no effect on the wage rates of less-skilled non-Cuban workers,” Card found, and virtually none on their
