When Immigrants Meet Exporters: A Reassessment of the Immigrant-Native Wage Gap

We use French employer-employee data for the manufacturing sector from 2005 to 2012 to reassess the wage gap between native and foreign workers. In line with previous evidence, we find that immigrants earn less than natives and that exporters pay higher wages. New in this literature, we find that the nativity wage gap varies with the export intensity of the firm and the occupational group of the worker within the firm. We present a model with heterogeneous firms and workers to show that our findings are consistent with white-collar immigrant workers capturing an informational rent, as they provide exporters with valuable information to access foreign markets. We provide empirical evidence for this mechanism by analysing how the nativity wage gap varies with the complexity of firm export activity and with the group of origin of the immigrant workers.