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

Labor markets in Central America and the Dominican Republic (CADR) face limited direct impacts from technological advancements compared to developed countries. However, substantial migration flows to high-income countries, particularly the United States (US), mean that the impacts of technological change do not stop at country borders. During the past 50 years recent migrants from both CADR and non-CADR countries, like US nonmigrant workers, have shifted out of production jobs requiring (automatable) routine manual and cognitive skills. While recent non-CADR migrants and US nonmigrants transitioned to higher-skilled work intensive in nonroutine cognitive and interpersonal tasks (e.g., management), recent CADR migrants shifted toward jobs intensive in nonroutine manual tasks (e.g., construction) and, to a lesser extent, in nonroutine interpersonal tasks (e.g., serving). In essence, migrants from other middle- and high-income countries have benefited from the same technology-skill complementarity as nonmigrant US workers, whereas CADR migrants seem to have filled the lower-skilled jobs created alongside technological advancement. The low-skill bias of CADR migrants suggests greater vulnerability to disruption from AI 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 CADR migration flows but impacts on high-skilled flows between 2010 and 2019. Adoption in the early 2000s improved labor market outcomes for high-skilled CADR migrants 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 CADR migrants during this latter decade.