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The Economics of Immigration pp 79–107Cite as

Who Immigrates? Theory and Evidence

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Abstract

Do immigrants differ from their source country and destination country native-born peers with respect to their personal characteristics and labor market performance? This chapter surveys recent theoretical work and empirical evidence that, since the late 1970s, examines how immigrants self-select with respect to partially unobservable characteristics such as innate ability or fully observable characteristics such as years of schooling. Specifically, this chapter examines how immigrants self-select in response to international differences in returns to skill and education, migrants’ cost constraints, and immigration policy, among other factors. This chapter also examines the literature on how immigrants assimilate in their destination societies, which indirectly has influenced discussions about the characteristics of those who immigrate. Unlike the last two chapters, which discussed the theoretical and empirical models separately, this chapter covers both the theoretical and empirical literatures.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For a detailed discussion of the econometric implications of self-selection behavior, see Heckman (1979).

  2. 2.

    It is worthwhile mentioning the more recent migrant selectivity model of Grogger and Hanson (2011). Recall that the class of models beginning with Borjas (1987) are based on the assumption that migration costs are proportional to income and that migrant flows are influenced by relative returns to skills. Grogger and Hanson’s model, in addition to not being reliant on the standard normal distribution, proceeds from the assumptions that there are fixed costs of migration and that migrant flows are influenced by absolute source/destination wage differences. They use their model to show that the likelihood of migration will depend positively on the level difference in source/destination skill-specific wages and negatively on migration costs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department Economics, St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, MN, USA

    Örn B. Bodvarsson

  2. Department Economics, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE, USA

    Hendrik Van den Berg

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  1. Örn B. Bodvarsson
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Bodvarsson, Ö.B., Van den Berg, H. (2013). Who Immigrates? Theory and Evidence. In: The Economics of Immigration. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2116-0_4

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