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The Representation of Immigrants in Federal, State, and Local Government Work Forces

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Abstract

Public sector employment of immigrants can increase their economic assimilation and potentially improve their treatment by government. Yet, as we show using Census data from 1990, 2000, and 2009–2011, immigrants are substantially underrepresented in federal, state, and local governments. To understand why, we use logit analysis for federal and for state and local government employment in each time period to test whether immigrants’ weaker educational attainment and English proficiency, lower probabilities of being citizens and military veterans, and different age, gender, and race/ethnicity distributions can explain that underrepresentation. Disparities in education and preferential government treatment of veterans are factors, but citizenship requirements appear to be the major obstacle to immigrant employment in the public sector.

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Notes

  1. Because we are not trying to describe the impact of age or education on the probability of public sector employment, we do not make the simplifying assumptions that the effect of education is linear and that the effect of age is parabolic. If those are, in fact, the patterns, the dummy variables will capture them, and in samples of 3 million, degree of freedom does not pose an issue.

  2. North Dakota and West Virginia are small states with low immigrant percentages, and sampling error is a possible explanation.

  3. Graphs for the other 2 years show very similar patterns. In regressions using states as the units of analysis, the slope varies only between .44 and .46 across the 3 years. The relationship is quite strong: the R 2 values range from .89 to .92.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Public Management and Policy, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, 30303, USA

    Gregory B. Lewis, Cathy Yang Liu & Jason T. Edwards

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  1. Gregory B. Lewis
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  2. Cathy Yang Liu
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  3. Jason T. Edwards
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Correspondence to Cathy Yang Liu.

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Lewis, G.B., Liu, C.Y. & Edwards, J.T. The Representation of Immigrants in Federal, State, and Local Government Work Forces. Int. Migration & Integration 15, 469–486 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12134-013-0282-8

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