Abstract
We examine the economic assimilation of immigrant men in the non-refugee groups that dominated post-1965 U.S. Asian immigration—Filipinos, Chinese, Koreans, Indians, and Japanese. We begin by analyzing how the entry earnings of these groups changed over time. We then estimate their earnings growth, first across one cross-section—the 1980 census—and then following cohorts across the 1980 and 1990 censuses. While previous studies find that immigrant earning growth rates estimated from a single cross-section are overstated because of a decline in entry earnings over time, we find earnings growth rates estimated from the cross-section are remarkably similar to earnings growth rates estimated by following cohorts across censuses. Key to our findings is the inverse relationship between entry earnings and earnings growth rates which we see because our statistical method allows the earnings growth rate of immigrant groups to vary by their level of entry earnings.
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.
Please refer to Reimers (2005, pp. 157–206).
- 2.
Authors’ estimates based on 1980 Census PUMS.
- 3.
See the discussion in Chap. 3 of what causes variation in skill transferability among immigrant groups.
- 4.
The United Kingdom/Ireland group has an exceptionally low percentage of immigrants with less than a high school education. Among all U.S.-born men (ages 25–64), 26% in 1980 and 18% in 1990 had less than 12 years of schooling. For U.S.-born non-Hispanic white men, 22.4% had less than 12 years of schooling in 1980.
- 5.
The proportion of college graduates among all of these immigrant groups—Asian, European, and Canadian—surpasses that of U.S. natives of whom 21.8% in 1980 and 25.1% in 1990 reported 16 or more years of schooling. In 1980, 24.5% of U.S.-born non-Hispanic white men, ages 25–64, had 16 or more years of schooling. The educational levels of the four developing Asian source countries that have dominated post-1965 non-refugee Asian immigration to the U.S. far exceed the educational levels of immigrants in general (Table 7.2). In 1980 and 1990, 17.4% and 12.3% of immigrants from the Philippines, China, Korea, and India reported less than 12 years of schooling compared with 36% of all immigrants in those years; 20.5% in 1980 and 26.2% in 1990 of the combined developing Asian group reported 18 or more years of schooling compared with 13.1% and 14.9% in those years for the all-immigrant group.
- 6.
The estimated coefficients of this model are presented in appendix A of Duleep and Regets (1992). U.S.-born men in this analysis include non-Hispanic white men only.
- 7.
Note that this situation has been changing rapidly in South Korea. The change in their relative level of economic opportunity relative to the U.S. should affect the entry earnings of immigrants to the U.S.
- 8.
The occupational skills (or employment-based) classification embraced two components: workers, skilled and unskilled, in occupations where labor is deemed scarce, and professionals, scientists, and artists of exceptional ability.
- 9.
Using different data sets, Jasso and Rosenzweig (1995), Duleep and Regets (1996a, b) and DeSilva (1996) find that family-based immigrants start their host-country lives with lower earnings than their employment-based statistical twins but have higher earnings growth; with time, the earnings of the two groups converge.
- 10.
Each simulation begins at age twenty-eight, which for immigrants also serves as the age at migration. For each subsequent year of the simulation, age, age squared, years since migration, years since migration squared, age × education, and years since migration × education are all appropriately incremented and multiplied by their estimated coefficients from the group-specific regressions.
- 11.
Note that the benchmark of U.S. born men in the analysis presented in Table 7.3 is limited to non-Hispanic white men.
- 12.
- 13.
The earnings of immigrants from English-speaking Europe and Canada continue to exceed the earnings of these Asian groups.
- 14.
Immigrants from the developing Asian countries share a similar beginning point to the all-immigrant category (last row of Table 7.5): the median unadjusted entry earnings of all immigrants in 1979 are about 50% of U.S. natives’ earnings; the median earnings of Chinese, Indians, Koreans, and Filipinos, combined, are about 55% of natives’ earnings in 1979. Yet, ten years later, the Asian median earnings are 107% of natives’ earnings, whereas the all-immigrant median is about 77% of natives’ earnings. The common beginning point of the all-immigrant and Asian groups, yet the far higher eventual earnings of the latter, is a manifestation of the interaction between the high education levels of Asian immigrants, relative to the all-immigrant group, and the acquisition of U.S.-specific skills. According to the IHCI Model , the lower the degree of transferability, the greater the effect of source-country human capital on the return to investment and the lesser the effect of source-country human capital upon opportunity costs. Thus, among groups lacking skill transferability, the more likely it will be that immigrants with higher levels of source-country human capital will have greater earnings growth than immigrants with lower levels of source-country human capital, and we will observe an even stronger inverse relationship between initial earnings and earnings growth. Refer to Chap. 4 on this point.
- 15.
Note that estimates of immigrant earnings growth based on either cross-sectional data or following cohorts are affected by emigration—the topic of Chap. 10. As such, neither necessarily provides an estimate of actual earnings growth.
- 16.
Changes in the adjusted entry earnings of immigrant cohorts from the same source country could result from changes in immigrant skill transferability as a function of changes in immigrant admission restrictions and changes in the economic opportunities of the source country vis-à-vis the U.S.
References
DeSilva, Arnold (1996) “Earnings of Immigrant Classes in the Early 1980s in Canada: A Re-examination,” Working Paper, Human Resource Development Canada, 1996.
Duleep, H. and Regets, M., (1992) “Some Evidence on the Effect of Admission Criteria on Immigrant Assimilation: The Earnings Profiles of Asian Immigrants in Canada and the U.S” in Immigration, Language and Ethnic Issues: Canada and the United States, Barry Chiswick (ed.). Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1992, pp. 410–437.
Duleep, H. and Regets, M. (1996a) “Admission Criteria and Immigrant Earnings Profiles,” International Migration Review, Summer, 30(2), 571–90.
Duleep, H. and Regets, M. (1996b) “Family Unification, Siblings, and Skills” in H. Duleep and P. V. Wunnava (editors), Immigrants and Immigration Policy: Individual Skills, Family Ties, and Group Identities, Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, pp. 219–244.
Friedberg, R. (1992) “The Labor Market Assimilation of Immigrants in the U.S.: The Role of Age at Arrival,” Brown University.
Friedberg, R. (1993) “The Success of Young Immigrants in the U.S. Labor Market: An Evaluation of Competing Explanations,” Brown University.
Jasso G, Rosenzweig MR. 1995. “Do Immigrants Screened for Skills Do Better than Family-Reunification Immigrants?” International Migration Review 29: 85–111.
Kossoudji, Sherrie A., “Immigrant Worker Assimilation: Is It a Labor Market Phenomenon?” Journal of Human Resources, Vol 24, No.3, Summer 1989, pp 494–527.
Reimers David M. 2005. Other Immigrants: The Global Origins of the American People, NY: NYU Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Duleep, H., Regets, M.C., Sanders, S., Wunnava, P.V. (2020). The Earnings Profiles of Immigrant Men in Specific Asian Groups: Cross-Sectional Versus Cohort-Based Estimates. In: Human Capital Investment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47083-8_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47083-8_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-47082-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-47083-8
eBook Packages: Economics and FinanceEconomics and Finance (R0)