Abstract
Only immigrants who could reap future benefits would embark on investment in U.S.-specific skills. This suggests that the decision to invest in U.S.-specific human capital and the decision to stay in the U.S. are jointly determined. Using the 1980 and 1990 census data, we estimate the fraction of men migrating between 1975 and 1980 who remained in the U.S. until 1990 by migrant group. We show that immigrant groups that are more likely to remain in the U.S. have higher earnings growth than groups with higher emigration. Japanese men serve as a case study. We show that, overall, they have high earnings upon entering the U.S., low U.S. specific skills, and low earnings growth. Japanese men who appear to be permanently in the U.S. have low earnings upon arrival and high rates of earnings growth.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Although this simple emigration measure ignores important factors such as mortality, it does provide a rough measure of relative permanence. For a more sophisticated treatment of emigration for all countries, refer to Ahmed and Robinson (1994).
- 3.
The surprisingly high emigration rate that we measure for immigrants from the former Soviet Union countries may reflect an increasing reluctance with time in the U.S. among immigrants from these countries to identify themselves on the census as being from these countries. Mortality differences reflecting an older age structure is another probable cause. Future analyses of emigration rates should take into account mortality differences.
- 4.
The exception to this pattern are immigrants from the former Soviet Union countries, whose entry earnings relative to U.S. natives are low, and who also have, by our measure, relatively high emigration. Note 3 describes a key deficiency in our emigration rate calculations.
- 5.
We further scaled the probability-of-staying estimates to a 0–100 scale by dividing all of the group-estimated probabilities by the computed Filipino probability of staying (105.28) and multiplying by 100.
- 6.
Immigrant men in the same source-country group who have been in the U.S. 30 or more years likely will have a high representation of persons who came to the U.S. as children. We of course don’t know whether individuals over age 20 migrated as children because the 1980 census only records “before 1950” as the earliest period of immigration. However, an analysis of the fraction of individuals speaking only English or speaking it well by age group suggests that many of the migrants who came before 1950 came as children. These individuals strike us as good comparisons as they are from the same ethnic background but since they migrated early had many of the advantages of native born.
- 7.
The negative growth in GDP for the Philippines may also contribute to the extremely high level of permanence for Filipino immigrant men.
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Duleep, H., Regets, M.C., Sanders, S., Wunnava, P.V. (2020). Permanence and the Propensity to Invest. In: Human Capital Investment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47083-8_10
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