He completed his M.Phil and Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 1975 for thesis titled Job Investment, Labor Mobility and Earnings.
[11] Borjas became an assistant professor of economics at Queens College, City University of New York from 1975 to 1977.
[12] Borjas was called "America’s leading immigration economist" by BusinessWeek and The Wall Street Journal.
[13] Borjas was the primary advisor to Jason Richwine, whose Harvard dissertation concluded that Latino immigrants to the U.S. are and will remain less intelligent than "native whites."
Borjas claimed that he "played no role in topic selection or forming the research agenda" for Richwine's dissertation, but some social science scholars noted it could be problematic for a dissertation advisor to fail to challenge a student's topic selection.
"[17] Nobel laureates Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo wrote of the debate that Borjas's analysis omitted comparisons to relevant groups for no clear reason.
[20] In August 2017, the Trump administration, while defending its plan to reduce levels of legal immigration to the United States by 50%, cited Borjas' research on the Mariel boatlift as evidence that low-skilled immigration reduced wages for American workers.
[25] After a peer-review scandal was revealed on the website, in June 2016, Borjas praised the discourse on the Economics Job Market Rumors website as being "refreshing": "There’s still hope for mankind when many of the posts written by a bunch of over-educated young social scientists illustrate a throwing off of the shackles of political correctness and reflect mundane concerns that more normal human beings share: prestige, sex, money, landing a job, sex, professional misconduct, sex..."[26][27] A 2017 paper found evidence of outright hostility towards women on the website.
"[26] According to Brad DeLong, "the only economics professor of any ideology or university I can recall ever praising EJMR is George Borjas.