The Impact of Technology on Migration to the United States from Central America and the Dominican Republic

Overview & Synopsis

Labor markets in Central America and the Dominican Republic face limited direct impacts from technological advancements compared to developed countries. However, substantial migration flows to high-income countries, particularly the United States, mean that the impacts of technological change do not stop at country borders. During the past 50 years, recent migrants from both Central America and the Dominican Republic and other countries, like US nonmigrant workers, have shifted out of production jobs requiring (automatable) routine manual and cognitive skills. Although recent non–Central America and the Dominican Republic migrants and US nonmigrants transitioned to higher-skilled work intensive in nonroutine cognitive and interpersonal tasks (for example, management), recent migrants from Central America and the Dominican Republic shifted toward jobs intensive in nonroutine manual tasks (for example, construction) and, to a lesser extent, in nonroutine interpersonal tasks (for example, serving). In essence, migrants from other middle- and high-income countries have benefited from the same technology-skill complementarity as nonmigrant US workers, whereas migrants from Central America and the Dominican Republic seem to have filled the lower-skilled jobs created alongside technological advancement. The low-skill bias of migrants from Central America and the Dominican Republic suggests greater vulnerability to disruption from artificial intelligence and mobile robotics, but less from language models like ChatGPT. Closer analysis of US robot adoption between 2000 and 2019 shows no effect on total migration flows from Central America and the Dominican Republic but impacts on high-skilled flows between 2010 and 2019. US robot adoption in the early 2000s improved labor market outcomes for high-skilled migrants from Central America and the Dominican Republic but in low-skilled, nonroutine occupations. Between 2010 and 2019, the demand expansion effect that seems to explain this improvement weakened. Robot adoption led to less demand for high-educated migrants from Central America and the Dominican Republic during this latter decade.