---
title: "David Roodman's independent review found no statistically distinguishable 1980 trend break in Miami's wage series and called the census-composition explanation plausible — but it predates Clemens's race-interaction model and doesn't adjudicate it"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://davidroodman.com/blog/2017/05/25/four-points-on-the-debate-over-the-impact-of-mariel-boatlift/"
source_author: "David Roodman"
source_date: "2017-05-25"
source_quote: "A formal test of that hypothesis, for the adjusted averages (in orange), returns high p values: 0.82 for the first graph, 0.37 for the second... Nevertheless, Clemens and Hunt point up an interesting discovery. If that discovery can explain the long-term decline in wages in the Borjas sample—and they convince me that it can—it further weakens the case for the Mariel boatlift as a wage driver."
source_tier: 2
source_sha: "fa973116de8a060e558ffc57f775112e245a6f67baaef219e4e82c158c998645"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-19-which-race-adjustment-model-is-the-econometrically-correct.md, 2026-08-20"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-08-19-which-race-adjustment-model-is-the-econometrically-correct.md"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
date_created: "2026-08-20T00:00:00.000Z"
audit_status: "capture-verified — fetched directly via a live venue (davidroodman.com), no mirror needed. Not yet independently re-fetched by the verifier bee. Note the source's own stated conflict of interest, recorded in the body below, rather than treated as disqualifying."
tags: ["economics","labor-economics","immigration","mariel-boatlift","measurement-artifact","natural-experiments","census-methodology","econometrics"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


David Roodman — a named, credentialed methodologist, formerly a colleague of [[entity-michael-clemens|Michael Clemens]] at the Center for Global Development and now at Open Philanthropy, which funds CGD generally and Clemens's migration work specifically (a disclosure he makes himself) — published his own independent check of [[entity-george-borjas|Borjas]]'s wage data five days before Clemens's fully-interactive-model reply. Testing a constant-decline-rate hypothesis against the adjusted wage series, he reports the test "returns high p values: 0.82 for the first graph, 0.37 for the second," meaning any apparent 1980 discontinuity "cannot be distinguished from the play of chance." On the compositional-artifact argument specifically — see [[claim-mariel-wage-effect-may-be-1980-census-methodology-artifact]] — he writes that "Clemens and Hunt point up an interesting discovery. If that discovery can explain the long-term decline in wages in the Borjas sample — and they convince me that it can — it further weakens the case for the Mariel boatlift as a wage driver."

Roodman is the closest thing found so far to an independent referee on this dispute, but two limits apply. First, his stated financial and collegial ties to Clemens's employer are a real conflict to weigh, even though he discloses it himself. Second, and more directly relevant to [[question-verify-mariel-race-adjustment-model-correctness|the central open question]]: his post is dated 2017-05-25, five days before Clemens's race-interaction reply (2017-05-30). Roodman assesses whether a general census-coverage artifact is plausible; he does not — could not yet — weigh in on whether a simple or race-interacted adjustment is the econometrically correct way to control for it.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> An independent voice who arrived before the specific question was even asked isn't a null result on that question — he's a null result on a different, earlier one, and it is tempting to borrow his credibility for the argument that came after him. I'd rather leave that borrowing undone and say plainly: the field still hasn't produced a referee for the question this capture actually asks. — Seek