Harriet Orcutt Duleep

The Decision to Work by Married Immigrant Women

Using 1980 Census data, the authors analyze the labor force participation of married immigrant Asian women by country of origin, compared with that of married immigrant women from Europe and Canada. The results suggest the existence of a family investment strategy: evidence from both across groups and within groups indicates that a womans decision to work is affected by whether she has a husband who invests in skills specific to the U.S. labor market, and also by the extent of that investment. Such a family response may help offset the low earnings of immigrant men who initially lack skills for which there is a demand in the American labor market.

Measuring immigrant wage growth using matched CPS files

Cross-sectional estimates of immigrant wage growth have painted an optimistic picture of the ability of immigrants to adapt to the U.S. labor market: Studies using cross-sectional data have generally found the wage growth of immigrants to exceed that of the native born. This optimistic picture of immigrant economic assimilation was challenged by the important finding that compared to earlier immigrant cohorts, recent immigrants started at much lower wages. As such, the high wage growth of immigrants relative to the native born measured in cross-sectional data may simply be the spurious result of declining immigrant earnings ability. In this paper, we match Current Population Survey samples so that the wages of individual immigrant and native-born men can be followed for one year. We find that the wage growth of immigrants does exceed that of the native born. The general finding of faster immigrant wage growth also holds when imposing the foreign-born geographic distribution upon natives, but not when imposing the native-born geographic distribution on the foreign born—a result consistent with some theories of immigrant assimilation. In each comparison, however, the actual wage growth of immigrants relative to natives is similar to the predictions of cross-sectional regressions. This similarity suggests that either there is no cohort quality bias in the cross-sectional estimates of immigrant wage growth, or that there has been a coincidental increase in immigrant wage growth as the entry wages of immigrants have fallen.

Measuring socioeconomic mortality differentials over time.

Using 1973 Current Population Survey data matched to 1973-1978 Social Security mortality records, this study measures the relationship between the income and education of men and their subsequent mortality. The estimated relationships are compared with socioeconomic mortality differentials found by Kitagawa and Hauser in their study of 1960 census-death certificate matched data. The comparison suggests that there has been no improvement in the relative mortality experience of low socioeconomic status men. More generally, the article discusses how Social Security data could be used to monitor, on a continual basis, our progress toward eradicating signficant mortality differentials in the United States.

Admission Criteria and Immigrant Earnings Profiles

There has been an ongoing concern about the productivity of kinship-based immigrants in the U.S. labor market. Despite the policy importance of this issue, little empirical or theoretical attention has been devoted to learning the effect of different admission criteria on immigrants’ economic performance. To estimate the effect of admission criteria on immigrant earnings profiles, we use 1980 census data on individuals matched to Immigration and Naturalization Service information on admission criteria for country-of-origin/year-of-entry immigrant cohorts. We find that nonoccupation-based immigration, most of which is family-based, is associated with lower entry earnings but higher earnings growth than occupation-based immigration. The higher estimated earnings growth is sufficient for nonoccupation-based immigrants to catch up with occupationally admitted immigrants after eleven to eighteen years in the United States.

Alternative approaches to model choice

Accepted model choice procedures are characterized. Problems concerning the determination of significance levels for multiple tests, Type II errors for specification error tests, and the use of point null hypotheses are reviewed. The potential gains from greater reliance on sensitivity analysis, incorporation of uncertain prior information, and experimentation are discussed. Attention is turned then to models which are explicitly approximations, and to the need, in this context, for choice procedures that provide a basis for ranking models in terms of the relative goodness of the approximations they provide.

The Adjustment of Immigrants in the Labor Market

Abstract This chapter explores immigrant labor market adjustment by first describing methodological and theoretical considerations central to the analysis of earnings growth and occupational mobility. When no restrictions are placed on entry earnings or earnings growth, an inverse relationship between immigrant entry earnings and earnings growth emerges. An implication of this relationship is that the popular method for controlling for cohort effects developed by Borjas, and used in almost all recent studies of immigrant adjustment, is flawed. Recent US immigrants have low initial earnings, relative to natives and earlier immigrant cohorts, but high earnings growth, a pattern consistent with high levels of human capital investment. Why immigrants invest more in human capital than natives, and why investment patterns vary across immigrant groups, is explored. Important individual attributes include how easily immigrants’ source-country human capital transfers to the host country and how permanently attached immigrants are to the host country. Economic and social contexts, beyond the individual, are highlighted. Labor market adjustment from a family perspective is examined, with light shed on the controversy surrounding the Family Investment Hypothesis. The chapter concludes with a framework for examining immigrant adjustment across the labor markets of major immigrant-host countries and with directions for future research.

U.S. Immigration Policy at a Crossroads: Should the U.S. Continue Its Family-Friendly Policy?

An ongoing debate is whether the U.S. should continue its family-based admission system, which favors visas for family members of U.S. citizens and residents, or adopt a more skills-based system, replacing family visas with employment-based visas. In many ways, this is a false dichotomy: family-friendly policies attract highly-skilled immigrants regardless of their own visa path, and there are not strong reasons why a loosening of restrictions on employment migrants need be accompanied by new restrictions on family-based immigration. Moreover, it is misleading to think that only employment-based immigrants contribute to the U.S. economy. Recent immigrants, who have mostly entered via kinship ties, are economically productive, a fact hidden by a flawed methodology that underlies most economic analyses of immigrant economic assimilation.

Earnings Growth versus Measures of Income and Education for Predicting Mortality

This paper begins an exploration to determine whether earnings growth, as a measure of the propensity to invest in human capital, is a valuable variable for predicting mortality. To insure its robustness and general applicability to ongoing Social Security models, the usefulness of earnings growth as a predictor of mortality will be explored in multiple time periods. This paper begins that process by reporting preliminary results for an early time period using the 1973 CPS-SSA-IRS Exact Match file. In addition to presenting preliminary results, the paper also describes how data challenges associated with the pre-1978 administrative record data on earnings and mortality are met.

Family-friendly and human-capital-based immigration policy

Immigrants who start with low earnings, such as family-based immigrants, experience higher earnings growth than immigrants who are recruited for specific jobs (employment-based immigrants). This occurs because family-based immigrants with lower initial earnings invest in human capital at higher rates than natives or employment-based immigrants. Therefore, immigrants who start at low initial earnings invest in new human capital that allows them to respond to the ever-changing needs of the host country’s economy.

Mass Immigration and the National Interest.

US immigration policy has stimulated the largest inflow of immigrants in the 1980s and 1990s than at any time in the history of the US. In this analysis, the author seeks to show how the policy was designed essentially by political considerations. Briggs argues that policy neglected immigrations economic impact at a time when the country was entering a fundamental economic adjustment. He believes that the US does not face labour shortage per se, but a shortage of quality labour. Yet immigration has led to a majority of new workers seeking unskilled jobs in declining sectors in manufacturing and services and has given rebirth to sweatshop enterprises and child labour law violations. For the first time in US history, ths author argues, the results of immigration policy are inconsistent with US national interest.