In 1980, Florida experienced an immigration restrictionist’s worst nightmare: a huge, rapid, and unauthorized influx of largely unskilled migrants.
That event was the Mariel boatlift, a mass migration that followed Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s April 1980 announcement that Cubans wishing to leave the country could do so. In just six months, 125,000 Cuban immigrants arrived in Florida, half of them settling in Miami.
“Observers in Miami at the time of the Boatlift noted the strain caused by the Mariel immigration,” wrote University of California, Berkeley, labor economist David Card in his highly influential (and contentious) 1990 paper on…
