125,000 refugees flooded Miami's job market. Wages barely moved.
When Fidel Castro let 125,000 Cubans leave for Miami in 1980, the city's labor force grew roughly 7% within months, a textbook shock to labor supply. Economist David Card compared Miami's wages and unemployment to similar cities and found almost no effect on native workers, even the least skilled. It became a landmark natural experiment on whether immigration hurts wages.