Public assistance receipt among immigrants and natives: How the unit of analysis affects research findings

Differences between immigrant and native households in rates of welfare receipt depend on nativity differences in individual-level rates of receipt, in household size, in mean number of recipients in receiving households, and in household nativity composition. We present algebraic derivations of these relationships and use data from the 1990 and 1991 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation to examine empirically the extent to which levels of welfare receipt for immigrants and natives are sensitive to the use of household-, family-, or individual-level units of analysis or presentation. The findings show that nativity differences are statistically significant only at the level of larger units. The results also indicate that if immigrants and natives had identical living arrangements, immigrants' household-level receipt of Supplemental Security Income would significantly exceed natives' receipt even more than it actually does, but the nativity difference in receipt of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) would reverse directions. Moreover, the level of AFDC receipt of immigrant households falls significantly below that of native households when native-born children living in households headed by immigrants are treated as if they were foreign born.     

Imputation Match Bias in Immigrant Wage Convergence

Although immigrants to the United States earn less at entry than their native-born counterparts, an extensive literature has found that immigrants have faster earnings growth that results in rapid convergence to native-born earnings. However, recent evidence based on U.S. Census data indicates a slowdown in the rate of earnings assimilation. We find that the pace of immigrant wage convergence based on recent data may be understated in the literature as a result of the method used by the census to impute missing information on earnings, which does not use immigration status as a match characteristic. Because both the share of immigrants in the workforce and earnings imputation rates have risen over time, imputation match bias for recent immigrants is more consequential than in earlier periods and may lead to an underestimate of the rate of immigrant wage convergence.     

Immigration and county employment growth

Prior literature has found that immigrants have no effect on the wages and employment of natives. However, this literature has not accounted for the possibility that immigrants contribute to employment growth in the areas where they locate. Research on internal migration has found that internal migrants contribute to local area employment growth. In this paper I compare the effects of natives and immigrants on county employment. Results show that the overall immigrant population contributes more to increases in employment than the overall native population. Recent immigrants and recent internal in-movers have similar effects on employment growth. The net contribution of immigrants to employment growth is confined to nonmanufacturing employment.     

Immigrant employment and earnings growth in Canada and the USA: evidence from longitudinal data

We study the short-term trajectories of employment, hours worked, and real wages of immigrants in Canada and the USA using nationally representative longitudinal datasets covering 1996–2008. Models with person fixed effects show that, on average, immigrant men in Canada do not experience any relative growth in these three outcomes compared to men born in Canada. Immigrant men in the USA, on the other hand, experience positive annual growth in all three domains relative to US-born men. This difference is largely on account of low-educated immigrant men, who experience faster or longer periods of relative growth in employment and wages in the USA than in Canada. We further compare longitudinal and cross-sectional trajectories and find that the latter over-estimate wage growth of earlier arrivals, presumably reflecting selective return migration.     

The incidence of subminimum pay among native and immigrant workers

This paper econometrically compares the subminimum wage propensities of immigrants and US natives using 1989 microdata. A conventional expectation is that immigrants are more likely to earn subminimum wages because of their lesser education and knowledge of labor rights. However, immigrants also tend to participate full time in the labor market and field studies suggest they provide employers an 'experienced' labor pool. Indeed, our findings indicate that immigrants by age, sex, and race/ethnic group are less likely than natives to receive subminimum wages. These findings imply that the foreign born do not contribute disproportionately to the informal economy.     

Does Human Capital Raise Earnings for Immigrants in the Low-Skill Labor Market?

We use monthly Survey of Income and Program Participation data from 1996–1999 and 2001–2003 to estimate the determinants of differentiation in intercepts and slopes for age/earnings profiles of low-skill immigrant and native male workers. Our findings provide further depth of understanding to the“mixed” picture of earnings determination in the low-skill labor market that has been reported by others. On the positive side, many immigrants are employed in similar occupations and industries as natives. Both groups show substantial wage gains over time and generally receive similar returns to years of schooling completed. Immigrants also receive substantial returns to acculturation, measured as age at arrival and English language skill. These results cast doubt on the strong version of segmented labor market theory, in which low-skill immigrants are permanently consigned to dead-end jobs with no wage appreciation. On the negative side, immigrants earn approximately 24% less than natives and are less likely to occupy supervisory and managerial jobs. Latino immigrants receive lower returns to education than do white immigrants. Furthermore, age at arrival and language ability do not explain the lower returns to education experienced by Latino immigrants. These results suggest that Latino immigrants in particular may suffer from barriers to mobility and/or wage discrimination. Whether these negative labor market experiences occur primarily for illegal immigrants remains unknown.     

Migration background and educational tracking

Research on immigrants’ educational disadvantages documents substantial immigrant–native achievement gaps in standardized student assessments. Exploiting data from the German PIRLS extension, we find that second-generation immigrants also receive worse grades and teacher recommendations for secondary school tracks than natives, which cannot be explained by differences in student achievement tests and general intelligence. Second-generation immigrants’ less favorable socioeconomic background largely accounts for this additional disadvantage, suggesting that immigrants are disproportionately affected by prevailing social inequalities at the transition to secondary school. We additionally show that differences in track attendance account for a substantial part of the immigrant–native wage gap in Germany.     

Factors Shaping Workplace Segregation Between Natives and Immigrants

Research on segregation of immigrant groups is increasingly turning its attention from residential areas toward other important places, such as the workplace, where immigrants can meet and interact with members of the native population. This article examines workplace segregation of immigrants. We use longitudinal, georeferenced Swedish population register data, which enables us to observe all immigrants in Sweden for the period 1990–2005 on an annual basis. We compare estimates from ordinary least squares with fixed-effects regressions to quantify the extent of immigrants’ self-selection into specific workplaces, neighborhoods, and partnerships, which may bias more naïve ordinary least squares results. In line with previous research, we find lower levels of workplace segregation than residential segregation. The main finding is that low levels of residential segregation reduce workplace segregation, even after we take into account intermarriage with natives as well as unobserved characteristics of immigrants’ such as willingness and ability to integrate into the host society. Being intermarried with a native reduces workplace segregation for immigrant men but not for immigrant women.     

Immigrant quality and assimilation: a review of the U.S. literature

Empirical research on US immigrants is reviewed: their productivity and assimilation; their contribution and use of public services; and their impact on native Americans. I discuss the characteristics of cohorts of immigrants that enter the United States at different times, and then quantify the assimilation of immigrants, typically in terms of economic productivity of immigrants compared with natives. Few have found quantifiable negative effects of immigrants on native wages or unemployment in local labor markets, but a more general equilibrium approach than has been empirically implemented may be needed to draw any conclusions regarding the distributional consequences of immigration. Received: 22 September 1995 / Accepted: 2 March 1997     

The substitutability of labor between immigrants and natives in the Canadian labor market: circa 1995

This paper examines the substitutability or complementarity between Canadian-born and immigrant workers. These are examined by estimating a set of wage equations using a generalized Leontief production function. The paper finds that, in general, there is no displacement of Canadian-born workers by immigrants. Recent immigrants affect the native-born positively, while older immigrants are neither substitute nor complement for natives. However, the effects differ across industries. Overall, the evidence that immigrants harm the opportunities of native-born workers is scant.

Earnings assimilation of immigrants in Norway – A reappraisal

The relative earnings growth for immigrants in Norway is computed. Unlike Hayfron (1998, this journal) we define immigrants by country of origin rather than citizenship and perform separate studies of immigrants from inside and outside the OECD region. Replicating Hayfron op.cit. we find that the earnings assimilation is considerably weaker. Further, we find that the earnings of OECD immigrants are comparable to those of natives, while Non-OECD immigrants earn considerably less than natives at the time of entry, but that their relative earnings improve gradually over time. Earnings of different immigrant cohorts converged from 1980 to 1990, indicating a non-linear rate of assimilation. Received: 7 April 2000/Accepted: 4 January 2001     

Ungleichheiten auf dem ?sterreichischen Arbeitsmarkt

Immigrants tend to be less successful on the Austrian labour market compared to their native-born counterparts. Prior research on the reasons for ethnic inequalities focuses mainly on individual characteristics as well as on their context dependence. Using microcensus data, this article explores the signalling value of foreign and native educational capital on the Austrian labour market. The results show that immigrants born in the new EU-countries, Serbia, or Turkey are exposed to statistical discrimination on the Austrian labour market: immigrants with higher qualifications experience disadvantages while those with lower qualifications are advantaged. The returns for second generation immigrants are close to those for Austrians without immigrant background.     

Ethnic diversity and well-being

This paper investigates how ethnic diversity, measured by immigrants’ nationalities, influences the well-being of the host country. Using panel data from Germany from 1998 to 2012, we find a positive effect of ethnic diversity on the well-being of German natives. Our finding is robust to alternative definitions of ethnic diversity and to the non-random selection of natives and immigrants into regions. The positive effect of ethnic diversity is stronger for immigrant groups that are culturally and economically closer to Germany. Consistent with this result, we document the existence of two mechanisms explaining the influence of ethnic diversity on well-being: productivity—as captured by immigrants’ skills and assimilation—and social capital—particularly in relation to the creation of a multicultural environment.     

Immigrant assimilation into US prisons, 1900–1930

The analysis of a new dataset on state prisoners in the 1900 to 1930 censuses reveals that immigrants rapidly assimilated to native incarceration patterns. One feature of these data is that the second generation can be identified, allowing direct analysis of this group and allowing their exclusion from calculations of comparison rates for the “native” population. Although adult new arrivals were less likely than natives to be incarcerated, this likelihood was increasing with their years in the USA. The foreign born who arrived as children and second-generation immigrants had slightly higher rates of incarceration than natives of native parentage, but these differences disappear after controlling for nativity differences in urbanicity and occupational status. Finally, while the incarceration rates of new arrivals differ significantly by source country, patterns of assimilation are very similar.     

The performance of immigrants in the Norwegian labor market

This paper tests the assimilation hypothesis with Norwegian data. Using both cross-section and cohort analyses, the results show that the 1970–1979 immigrant cohort experienced an earnings growth of about 11% between 1980 and 1990, when their earnings profile was compared to that of natives. This is lower than the 19% assimilation rate predicted by the cross-section method. On the contrary, the results reveal a rapid earnings divergence across cohorts, and between the 1960–1969 cohort and natives. It is also shown that the „quality” of successive immigrant waves has declined over time, thus biasing the cross-section estimates of assimilation. Received: 8 August 1995 / Accepted: 7 January 1997     

Parental characteristics and the schooling progress of the children of immigrant and U.S.-born blacks

In this study, I examine disparities in schooling progress among children born to immigrant and U.S.-born blacks. I find that in one- and two-parent families, children born to black immigrants are less likely to fall behind in school than those born to U.S.-born blacks. In two-parent immigrant families, children born to two immigrant parents have a significant schooling advantage over children born to one immigrant parent. While children born to two immigrant parents in the wealthiest black immigrant families do better in the second generation than in the first, the reverse is observed among children in less wealthy families. These findings contribute in two ways to our understanding of the assimilation processes of children born to black immigrant parents. First, they show that there is a positive association between the number of immigrant parents in a family and children’s schooling performance. Second, they suggest that disparities in the assimilation patterns of the children of black immigrants are a likely product of the interaction between their parental characteristics and the socioeconomic circumstances of their families.     

The Value of an Employment-Based Green Card

The need for and role of highly skilled immigrant workers in the U.S. economy is fiercely debated. Proponents and opponents agree that temporary foreign workers are paid a lower wage than are natives. This lower wage partly originates from the restricted mobility of workers while on a temporary visa. In this article, we estimate the wage gain to employment-based immigrants from acquiring permanent U.S. residency. We use data from the New Immigrant Survey (2003) and implement a difference-in-difference propensity score matching estimator. We find that for employer-sponsored immigrants, the acquisition of a green card leads to an annual wage gain of about $11,860.     

Receptivity Attitudes and the Occupational Attainment of Male and Female Immigrant Workers

This paper seeks to extend assimilation scholarship by focusing on the impact ofimmigrant receptivity attitudes. We test the hypotheses that receptivity attitudestoward immigrants held by citizens of metropolitan and regional labor marketswill have a direct impact, and/or interact with the educational human capital ofimmigrants, in explaining the occupational attainment of male and female immigrantworkers. Multi-level modeling is used to test the impact of aggregated immigrantreceptivity attitude measures, derived from the General Social Survey, which arespatially merged with immigrant worker human capital, individual-level assimilation,and area labor market indicators to predict managerial/professional and service/laboroccupation attainment of immigrant workers from a merged 1995–97 CurrentPopulation Survey data file. The results provide support for the receptivity attitudesthesis with statistically significant effects on service and labor attainment, but showminimal effects on managerial and professional occupational attainment. The keyreceptivity dimensions affecting occupational attainment are native-born citizens'attitudes concerning the impact of immigrants on American society, and attitudeson English-only language policies. The results show no systematic support for thereverse causation hypothesis that the occupational patterns of immigrants determinethe immigrant receptivity attitudes of citizens.     

International migration and labor force participation of married women

A focal issue in international immigration research has been immigration adaptation and assimilation and especially absorption and integration of immigrants into labor force roles. Nevertheless, such research has largely been focused on immigrant men, neglecting the systematic examination of labor force participation among immigrant women. This research is focused on the correlates of economic activity among immigrant and native born Jewish, urban, married females aged 18–54 in Israel. The specific objectives of the investigation are: (1) the impact of education, socioeconomic status, familial child care burdens, and ethnic background on the economic activity of native-born and immigrant, married women; and (2) to evaluate the extent to which the above patterns vary by veterancy and age. The data for this analysis are drawn from Israel's quarterly labor force survey of 6,000 families for 1970 and 1971. Education, socioeconomic status, ethnic origin, and child care burden were all found to have some effect on women's labor force participation; however, the pattern of effect was different for younger and older women and varied by veterancy status. Indications can be found in the data that age at immigration, or in other words the point in the women's life cycle at which immigration occurs, makes a difference in the type and strength of effect of immigration on labor force participation.Requests for reprints should be directed to Moshe Hartman, Department of Sociology, Population Research Laboratory, Utah State University, Logan, Utah 84322.     

Comparing Life Satisfaction of Immigrants and Natives Across Europe: The Role of Social Contacts

Research on immigrants’ assimilation is widespread both in the U.S. and Europe. While it has been extensively studied how immigrants fare compared to natives on socio-economic indicators, few studies have focussed on immigrants’ perception of their position. In this paper we focus on comparing life satisfaction of immigrants and natives across Europe and on the role of social embeddedness. Using data from the first six rounds (2002–2012) of the European Social Survey, a repeated cross-sectional survey, we find that life satisfaction among immigrants is lower than among natives even though differences diminish over generations. For first generation immigrants part of the life satisfaction gap is explained by the lower level of social embeddedness they have compared to natives. We also find that social embeddedness is a key explanatory factor for life satisfaction for both immigrants and natives. For two out of the three indicators of social embeddedness that we consider we however find different patterns of association with life satisfaction for immigrants compared to natives.