In the following chapters, factors that influence labor market outcomes and
assimilation of immigrants in the United States are analyzed in an economic framework.
The channels studied include the impact of larger flows of immigrants on the
wages of other immigrants from the same countries, the effects of marrying a native
or “intermarriage” on labor market outcomes of immigrant women and the impact of
age of arrival to the U.S. on English proficiency and education of immigrant children.
Immigration is a matter of current economic and socio-political debate all over the
world, and the results presented in the following chapters are of particular interest
to policy-makers and economists who design domestic and foreign policies.
For all the work in this thesis, I use data from the U.S. decennial Censuses which
are rich sources of information on the characteristics of immigrants. Chapter one
provides a motivation and an overview for the research in chapters two through four.
The second chapter studies the wage-gap profiles, vis-a-vis natives, of a rapidly growing
group of “new” Asian immigrants from countries which were under-represented
in the United States until 1965. While entry-level wage gaps increase and assimilation
rates fall across cohorts, the unique feature of the new Asian profile is that
the wage gap widens for all cohorts after the second decade of stay. For other immigrant
groups, wage gaps improve throughout their working life. I use an impact of
immigration argument to investigate the different curvature of “new” Asian wagegap
profiles. If occupations are imperfect substitutes, and natives and immigrants
are worse substitutes than entrant and established immigrants within occupations,
then the comparatively larger increases in occupation-specific “new” Asian inflows
will have a greater negative impact on the wages of new Asians, compared to other
groups.