Abstract
This chapter is an analysis of the English-language proficiency and labor market earnings of adult male Soviet Jewish immigrants to the United States from 1965 to 2000, using the 2000 Census of Population. Comparisons are made to similar analyses using the 1980 and 1990 Censuses. A consistent finding is that recently arrived Soviet Jewish immigrants have lower levels of English proficiency and earnings than other immigrants, other variables being the same. However, they have a steeper improvement in both proficiency and earnings with duration in the United States and the differences from the other European immigrants disappear after a few years. The Soviet Jewish immigrants have both a higher level of schooling and a larger effect of schooling on earnings than other immigrants, even other European immigrants.
The lower initial English proficiency and earnings, the steeper improvement with duration and the rapid attainment of parity is consistent with the “refugee” nature of their migration, as distinct from being purely economic migrants. That the same pattern exists across three censuses suggests that the low English proficiency and earnings of those recently arrived in the 2000 Census data reflects a refugee assimilation process, and not a decline in the unmeasured dimensions of the earnings potential of recent cohorts of Soviet Jewish immigrants. The very high level of schooling and the larger effect of schooling on earnings among Soviet Jewish immigrants are similar to the patterns found among Jews born in the United States.
Soviet Jewish immigrants appear to have made a very successful linguistic and labor market adjustment, regardless of their period of entry into the United States.
This is a revision of the original article published in Research in Labor Economics, 24, 2006, pp. 179–216. Co-authored with Michael Wenz. I am responsible for the current version.
Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the Conference on Soviet and Post-Soviet Jewry, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, December 28–30, 2003, the Conference on Immigration, Minorities, and Social Exclusion, Bar-Ilan University, June 27–28, 2004, and the Fourteenth World Congress of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, August 2005.
Chiswick acknowledges the research support of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs, University of Illinois. Comments on earlier version from Carmel U. Chiswick, Allen Glicksman, and Mark Tolts are appreciated.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Analyses using a similar methodology have been conducted for the Hebrew language proficiency and labor market earnings of Jewish immigrants in Israel. See Chiswick (<CitationRef CitationID="CR5" >1988</Citation Ref>) and Chiswick and Repetto (<CitationRef CitationID="CR14" >2001</Citation Ref>) for analyses of the 1972 and 1983 Censuses of Israel. Unfortunately, the 1995 Census did not include any questions on language usage or language proficiency. The U.S. and Israel studies are not strictly comparable because of differences in the Census questionnaires, the nature of immigration into these two countries, the relative magnitudes of the immigration flows after the collapse of the Soviet Union (small for the U.S., large for Israel), and the differences in the local (native) populations. Israel policy regarding intensive efforts to promote Hebrew language usage among immigrants was relaxed with regards to the Russian-speaking immigrants who arrived following the collapse of the FSU. For a discussion of this implicit change in policy see Glinert (<CitationRef CitationID="CR15" >1995</Citation Ref>).
- 2.
In principle, data from the National Jewish Population Survey (NJPS) 2000/2001 can be used to study the economic status of Soviet Jewish immigrants. The NJPS 2000/2001, however, provides a relatively smaller sample of Soviet Jews. Of the 5, 148 respondents, both male and female aged 18 and over, only 281 were born in the FSU. This would provide too small a sample for the statistical analysis of adult (age 25–64) men. There is no more recent national data on Jews with information on earnings.
- 3.
With the demise of the Soviet Union and the reunification with East Germany, Germany instituted a special immigration program to attract Soviet Jews to rebuild the German Jewish community (see Tress <CitationRef CitationID="CR20" >1995</Citation Ref>). In 2005, the German government was taking steps to effectively close this program (Bernstein <CitationRef CitationID="CR2" >2005</Citation Ref>).
- 4.
According to the 2000 Census, the ethnic origins (ancestry) of the adult (aged 25–64) males born in the Soviet Union who immigrated in 1965 or later were 41 percent Russian, 20 percent Ukrainian, 11 percent Armenian, 10 percent response indicating a religion, 6 percent no ancestry reported, and 13 percent other responses. By languages spoken in the home, “only English” was reported by 4 percent, Russian 72 percent, Armenian 9 percent, Ukrainian 7 percent, Yiddish 0.2 percent, and all other languages 8 percent. There was little variation in the reported ancestry or language by sub-period of immigration. See Appendix Tables <InternalRef RefID="Tab9" >8.9</Internal Ref> and <InternalRef RefID="Tab10" >8.10</Internal Ref>.
- 5.
The very low proportion reporting Yiddish reflects the very rapid decline in the use of Yiddish by Russian/Soviet Jews during the twentieth century. By the 1970s, “for the great majority of contemporary Soviet Jews (80 percent of our respondents), Russian is the native language”, with the proportion being greater for younger Jews. Yiddish was spoken primarily by older Jews or when younger Jews were speaking with their parents (Karklins <CitationRef CitationID="CR16" >1987</Citation Ref>, p. 29).
- 6.
The schooling data cannot be decomposed into pre- and post-migration schooling, although given the age at migration there is likely to be little post-migration schooling among Soviet Jews.
- 7.
Given the high labor force participation rate of 25–64 year old men, the deletion of those who did not work has little impact on the analysis.
- 8.
“Rural residence” is defined as living on a farm in the 2000 Census analysis and living in a rural area (farm or non-farm) in the 1980 and 1990 Census analyses.
- 9.
Tolts (<CitationRef CitationID="CR18" >2004a</Citation Ref>) also finds a very low re-migration rate of Soviet Jewish immigrants who arrive in Israel.
- 10.
The period of arrival categories used here are: 1996.–2000, 1991–1995, 1987–1990, 1985–1986, 1980–1984, 1975–1979, 1970–1974, and 1965–1969. For the proportion of the sample who arrived in each interval, see Appendix Table <InternalRef RefID="Tab12" >8.12</Internal Ref>.
- 11.
In the 2000 Census, unlike previous censuses, there is republic of birth codes for each of the 15 republics in the FSU , as well as a generic “USSR” code. Excluding those reporting Armenian by ancestry or language or that they speak Ukrainian at home, 46 percent reported the Russian Republic, 29 percent the Ukraine, 6 percent the USSR, 5 percent Belarus, and 14 percent reported having been born in the other 12 republics (Appendix Table <InternalRef RefID="Tab11" >8.11</Internal Ref>). In the post-World War II censuses until 2000 only the three Baltic Republics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) were separately identified from the rest of the Soviet Union because the U.S. State Department did not recognize their incorporation into the Soviet Union.
- 12.
A notable exception is the much larger positive effect of being married in the most recent cohort, 1990–2000.
- 13.
For a discussion of the regional distribution of immigrants and their language skills, see Chiswick and Miller (<CitationRef CitationID="CR13" >2005</Citation Ref>).
- 14.
Lower initial English proficiency and earnings and a speedier improvement appear to be a general refugee phenomenon, although not the larger payoff from schooling (see Chiswick <CitationRef CitationID="CR3" >1978</Citation Ref>, <CitationRef CitationID="CR4" >1979</Citation Ref>; Chiswick and Miller <CitationRef CitationID="CR12" >1998</Citation Ref>).
References
Ahmed, B., and Robinson, J.G. 1994. Estimates of emigration of the foreign-born population: 1980–1990. US Bureau of the Census, Population Division Technical Working Paper no. 9.
Bernstein, R. 2005. Policy shifts in Germany trims Jewish migration. New York Times, February 20.
Chiswick, B.R. 1978. The effect of Americanization on the earnings of foreign-born men. Journal of Political Economy 86 (5): 897–922.
———. 1979. The economic progress of immigrants: Some apparently universal patterns. In Contemporary economic problems, ed. W. Fellner, 357–399. Washington: American Enterprise Institute.
———. 1988. Hebrew language usage: Determinants and effects on earnings among immigrants in Israel. Journal of Population Economics 11 (2): 253–271.
———. 1991. Jewish immigrant skill and occupational status at the turn of the century. Explorations in Economic History 28 (1): 64–86.
———. 1992. Jewish immigrant wages in America in 1909: An analysis of the Dillingham commission data. Exploration in Economic History 29 (3): 274–289.
———. 1993. Soviet Jews in the United States: An analysis of their linguistic and economic adjustment. International Migration Review 27 (2): 260–286.
———. 1997. Soviet Jews in the United States: Language and labor market adjustments revisited. In Russian Jews on three continents: Migration and resettlement, ed. N.L. Epstein, Y. Ro’i, and P. Ritterband, 233–260. London: Frank Cass Publishers.
———. 1999. The occupational attainment and earnings of American Jewry, 1890-1990. Contemporary Jewry 20: 68–98.
———. 2000. Are immigrants favorably self-selected: An economic analysis. In Migration theory: Talking across disciplines, ed. C.D. Brettell and J.F. Hollifield, 61–76. New York: Routledge.
Chiswick, B.R., and P.W. Miller. 1998. English language fluency among immigrants in the United States. Research in Labor Economics 17: 151–200.
———. 2005. Do enclaves matter in immigrant adjustment. City and Community 4 (1): 5–35.
Chiswick, B.R., and G. Repetto. 2001. Immigrant adjustment in Israel: Literacy and fluency in Hebrew and earnings. In International migration: Trends, policy and economic impact, ed. S. Djajic, 204–228. New York: Routledge.
Glinert, L.H. 1995. Inside the language planner’s head: Tactical responses to a mass immigration. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 16 (5): 351–372.
Karklins, R. 1987. Determinants of ethnic identification in the USSR: The Soviet Jewish case. Ethnic and Racial Studies 10 (1): 27–47.
Mulder, T. J. 2003. Foreign-born emigration from the United States: 1990 to 2000. Paper presented at the Population Association of America, Annual Meeting, Minneapolis, May.
Tolts, M. 2004a. Demographic trends among the Jews of the FSU. Paper presented at the International Conference on Soviet and Post-Soviet Jewry in Honor of Professor Mordechai Altshuler, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, December 28–30, 2003. (Revised January 12).
———. 2004b. The post-Soviet Jewish population in Russia and the world. Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe 1 (52): 37–63.
Tress, M. 1995. Soviet Jews in the Federal Republic of Germany: The rebuilding of a community. The Jewish Journal of Sociology 37 (1): 39–54.
U.S. Bureau of the Census. 2003. 2000 Census of population and housing, public use microdata sample, United States, Technical Documentation, Washington, DC.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Appendix
Appendix
Data from the 2000 Census analysis on immigrants to the US are given in Tables 8.9 to 8.14.
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Chiswick, B.R., Wenz, M. (2020). The Linguistic and Economic Adjustment of Soviet Jewish Immigrants in the United States, 1980–2000. In: Chiswick, B. (eds) Jews at Work. Studies of Jews in Society, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41243-2_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41243-2_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-41242-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-41243-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)