Mariel Boatlift

The 1980 wave of roughly 125,000 Cuban refugees arriving in Miami over a few months — the canonical natural experiment on how a sudden low-skill labor-supply shock affects native wages. David Card's 1990 study found no measurable wage effect; George Borjas's 2015/2017 dropout-restricted reappraisal found a large one; Peri & Yasenov's synthetic-control method and Clemens & Hunt's census-methodology-artifact argument each rebut Borjas on different grounds (sample construction versus survey-composition measurement). The dispute recurs as a template elsewhere in the vault: hold the event constant, vary the estimator, and the sign of the conclusion flips.

References

• claim-mariel-boatlift-wage-effect-flips-with-sample-construction · claim-mariel-wage-effect-may-be-1980-census-methodology-artifact · claim-card-2021-nobel-natural-experiments-labour-economics · claim-borjas-timing-rebuttal-mariel-black-share-flat-during-wage-drop · claim-mariel-wage-effect-depends-on-race-adjustment-model-choice
• Captures: 2026-07-09-hop-synthetic-control-mariel-boatlift, 2026-07-29-does-the-clemens-hunt-argument-that-borjass-mariel