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Ethnic intermarriage among immigrants: human capital and assortative mating

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Abstract

This paper analyzes the determinants of interethnic marriages by immigrants in the United States. The dependent variable is intermarriage across ethnic groups (on the basis of ancestry and country of birth) and the inclusion of the explanatory variables is justified by a simple rational choice economic model. A binomial logistic regression is estimated using data from the 1980 US Census, the last Census where post-migration marriages can be identified. Results show that the probability of intermarriage increases the longer a migrant resides in the U.S. and the younger the age at arrival. Both relationships can be attributable to the accumulation of US-specific human capital and an erosion of ethnic-specific human capital. Inter-ethnic marriages are more likely between individuals with similar education levels, providing evidence of positive assortative mating by education for immigrants. The construction of the “availability ratio” for potential spouses from one’s own group and group size where one lives using data from several Censuses provides a the measure of the marriage market. Intermarriage is lower the greater the availability ratio and the larger the size of one’s own group. Linguistic distance of the immigrant’s mother tongue from English indirectly measures the effect of English language proficiency at arrival and is found to be a significant negative predictor of intermarriage. Those who report multiple ancestries and who were previously married are more likely to intermarry.

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Notes

  1. Immigrant Ethnic Intermarriage Rates, Age 18–64, By Selected Ancestry and Country of Birth, 1980 Census

     

    Intermarriage defined by

    Ancestry

    Percent

    Country of birth

    Percent

    Icelander

    89

    Luxembourg

    90

    Thai

    57

    Germany

    76

    Ukrainian

    51

    Canada

    72

    Jamaican

    31

    Honduras

    51

    Puerto Rican

    30

    Cuba

    22

    Italian

    24

    Portugal

    19

    Asian Indian

    11

    Haiti

    15

    1. Source 1980 Census of Population, Public Use Microdata Sample, Five Percent Sample

  2. While reportedly 1.7 million legal permanent resident visas were issued in 1990, this includes about 1.0 million illegal aliens who received permanent resident alien status under one of the two provisions of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. Therefore, about 700,000 of the 1990 immigrants are comparable to the 300,000 immigrants admitted in 1970.

  3. The acquisition of US-specific human capital need not necessarily imply an eroding of the individual’s ethnic-specific human capital.

  4. There is no way to distinguish between the native-born who are second generation from those who are third or higher order generations in the 1980 Census or later Censuses.

  5. Ethnic-specific human capital refers to capital that is productive in terms of ethnicity (e.g., knowing how to celebrate ethnic holidays). US-specific human capital refers to human capital that is productive in the US, but is general across ethnic groups in the US (e.g., English language).

  6. It should be noted that the theory predicts changes in the probability of intermarriage, a continuous variable, while the data measures intermarriage as a dichotomous variable. However, there is no qualitative effect of this distinction on the conclusions.

  7. For men the ratio is \( {}^{M}AR_{ijk} = {\frac{{\sum\limits_{i - 2}^{i + 8} {F_{ijk} } }}{{\sum\limits_{i}^{i + 10} {M_{ijk} } }}} \)

  8. Fossett and Kiecolt (1991) point out that there is a structure of preference within the broad age ranges and suggest using weights. While this appears to be useful, Goldman et al. (1984) have found weighted and un-weighted sex ratios to be statistically similar. In addition, assigning weights to particular age groups would be rather arbitrary, as personal preferences vary.

  9. Appendix includes a list of these ethnicities and their components and a lit of countries of birth which are used as the second proxy for ethnicity. Tables in these Appendices show intermarriage rates among immigrants where ethnicity is defined by ancestry and country of birth. Only eight percent of the sample reports a multiple ancestry for the 1980 Census data.

  10. The analysis for Veterans is reported in the gender specific equations in Chiswick and Houseworth (2008, Tables B1 and B3). The veteran variable is defined as follows: VET75 is equal to 1 if the respondent served in the US military in May 1975 or later and equal to 0 otherwise. VETVIET is equal to 1 if the respondent served in the military during the Vietnam War (August 1964–April 1975) and equal to 0 otherwise. VET55_64 is equal to 1 if the respondent served in the military between February 1955 and July 1964 and equal to 0 otherwise. VETKOR is equal to 1 if the respondent served in the military during the Korean Conflict (June 1950–January 1955) and equal to 0 otherwise. VETWWII is equal to 1 if the respondent served in the military during WWII (September 1940–July 1947) and equal to 0 otherwise. VETOTHER is equal to one if the respondent served in the military at any other time. SPSVET is a dichotomous variable equal to one if the immigrant female’s husband served in the US military, referred to as “war brides”, even if the sources was not in a period of war.

  11. The Census permits the identification of state or country of birth, state of residence 5 years ago if it was in the US, and current place of residence.

  12. Individuals that migrated as children are the benchmark group and range in age from 0 to 13 (AGM0_13). Teenagers are classified as having immigrated between the ages of 14 and 17 (AGM14_17) and young adults as between the ages of 18–23 (AGM18_23). Adults are divided into three groups: those who migrated between the ages of 24 and 28 (AGM24_28), the ages of 29 and 35 (AGM29_35), and those who migrated at age 36 or after (older immigrants) (AGM36).

  13. Note in Table 3 the very high intermarriage rate among women, but not among men from language groups the most distant from English, in particular, Korean and Japanese.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank those who made helpful comments at the IZA Third Migrant Ethnicity 2007 Meeting, the Society of Labor Economists Meetings (2008) and at the Stockholm University Linnaeus Center for Integration Studies (2009). We also appreciate the very helpful comments of the REHO editor and referees.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Barry R. Chiswick & Christina Houseworth

  2. IZA, Bonn, Germany

    Barry R. Chiswick

  3. Litigation Analytics, New York, NY, USA

    Christina Houseworth

Authors
  1. Barry R. Chiswick
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  2. Christina Houseworth
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Correspondence to Barry R. Chiswick.

Appendix

Appendix

See Appendix Tables 4 and 5.

Table 4 Data sources and definitions of the variables
Full size table
Table 5 List of Ancestries and Countries of birth
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Chiswick, B.R., Houseworth, C. Ethnic intermarriage among immigrants: human capital and assortative mating. Rev Econ Household 9, 149–180 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-010-9099-9

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