Ethnic Capital and Intergenerational Mobility

Assuming that ethnicity acts as an externality in the human capital accumulation process, this chapter analyzes the extent to which ethnic skill differentials are transmitted across generations. The skills of the next generation depend on parental inputs and on the quality of the ethnic environment in which parents make their investments, or “ethnic capital.” The empirical evidence reveals that the skills of today's generation depend not only on the skills of their parents, but also on the average skills of the ethnic group in the parents’ generation.

Is the New Immigration Less Skilled Than the Old?

This chapter analyzes trends in the skills of immigrants to the United States in the post-World War II period. Changes in the supply, demand, and institutional factors determining immigration are analyzed for their implications for immigrant skills. The empirical analysis uses INS administrative data, the 1970 and 1980 Censuses, and the 1976 Survey of Income and Education. Relatively more immigrants are now coming from countries whose nationals earn less in the United States. The schooling level of immigrants has been fairly stable; the declining level for the growing Hispanic immigration is offset by the high level of the increasing Asian immigration. Immigrant quality, ceteris paribus, is analyzed. Policy implications are discussed.

Do Enclaves Matter in Immigrant Adjustment?

This chapter is concerned with the determinants and consequences of immigrant/linguistic concentrations (enclaves). The reasons for the formation of these concentrations are discussed. Hypotheses are developed regarding “ethnic goods” and the effect of concentrations on the immigrant's language skills, as well as the effects on immigrant earnings of destination language skills and the linguistic concentration. These hypotheses are tested using PUMS data from the 1990 U.S. Census on adult male immigrants from non-English-speaking countries. Linguistic concentrations reduce the immigrant’s own English language skills. Moreover, immigrants’ earnings are lower the lower their English language proficiency and the greater the linguistic/ethnic concentration in their origin language of the area in which they live. The adverse effects on earnings of poor destination language skills and of immigrant concentrations exist independently of each other. The hypotheses regarding ethnic goods are supported by the data.

The Self-Employment Experience of Immigrants

Self-employment is an important aspect of the immigrant experience in the labor market. Self-employment rates for immigrants exceed 15 percent for some national groups. Using the 1970 and 1980 U.S. Censuses, the analysis shows that self-employment rates of immigrants exceed those of native-born men; that there is a strong, positive impact of assimilation on self-employment rates; that more recent waves of immigrants are opting with increasing frequency for the self-employment option; and that part of the immigrant/native-born differential in self-employment rates can be attributed to “enclave” effects.

The Economic Benefits from Immigration

Natives benefit from immigration mainly because of production complementarities between immigrant workers and other factors of production, and these benefits are larger when immigrants are sufficiently “different” from the stock of native productive inputs. The available evidence suggests that the economic benefits from immigration for the United States are small, on the order of $6 billion and almost certainly less than $20 billion annually. These gains, however, could be increased considerably if the United States pursued an immigration policy which attracted a more skilled immigrant flow.

Self-Selection and the Earnings of Immigrants

This chapter analyzes the way in which the earnings of the immigrant population may be expected to differ from the earnings of the native population because of the endogeneity of the decision to migrate. The empirical study shows that differences in the U.S. earnings of immigrants with the same measured skills, but from different home countries, are attributable to variations in political and economic conditions in the countries of origin at the time of migration.

Managing Immigration in the 21st Century

In this chapter, written explicitly for this volume, I share my thoughts on immigration policy. As a social scientist it is appropriate to assess the consequences, the costs and benefits, of alternative immigration policies. The policies that a country adopts regarding immigration, however, should be the outcome of a political process which should be informed by, but not dictated by, social science research....

Reflections on Immigration Economics

It has been most rewarding to witness the explosive growth in the amount of effort and attention that economists pay to immigration-related issues over the past 30 years. In the early 1980s, few economists seemed interested in these topics; the debate over immigration issues in the United States and Europe did not raise fundamental questions about social policy; and there were few technical or conceptual issues that cried out for an unambiguous resolution. The intellectual landscape has changed dramatically. Thirty years later, immigration-related issues attract an ever-increasing number of economists to examine the many questions that are raised by the policy debate; by the role that migration flows – and international migration flows, in particular – play in determining labor market outcomes in both sending and receiving countries; and by the ambiguities and difficult identification problems that permeate the models and econometric methods that are used to measure these outcomes....

Ethnic Networks and Language Proficiency Among Immigrants

Recent research on the linguistic adjustment of minority-language-speaking immigrants in several destinations has found that acquisition of destination language skills is inhibited by living in an area where many others speak the same minority language. This chapter uses a unique data set for Australia (1988) that includes a variety of ethnic network variables to analyze the role of the language concentration measure. These ethnic variables, in particular, ethnic press, relatives in Australia, and spouse's origin language, are highly statistically significant. Their inclusion in the equation eliminates the effect of the minority-language concentration variable. The model for analyzing the determinants of English reading and English writing skills in Australia is also shown to be very similar to the model for speaking fluency, including the effect of the ethnic network variables.

The “Negative” Assimilation of Immigrants: A Special Case

This chapter studies whether “negative” assimilation among immigrants living in the United States occurs if skills are highly transferable internationally. It outlines the conditions for negative assimilation in the context of the traditional immigration assimilation model, in which negative assimilation arises not from a deterioration of skills but from a decline in the wages afforded by skills coincident with the duration of residence. The authors use U.S. Census data from 1980, 1990, and 2000 to test the hypothesis on immigrants to the United States from English-speaking developed countries. They present comparisons with native-born workers to determine whether the findings are sensitive to immigrant cohort quality effects and find that even after controlling for these effects, negative assimilation still occurs for immigrants in the sample. They also find that negative assimilation occurs for immigrants from English-speaking developed countries living in Australia and for immigrants from Nordic countries living in Sweden.