Essays on immigration

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of Economics, 2011.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 wage-gap 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. The explanation is studied in a nested constant elasticity of substitution (CES) framework. Elasticity parameters are estimated using cross-metropolitan variations in occupational and immigrant labor supply. The paper follows Card (2009) to create an instrument for regional labor supplies. Finally, to assess the power of this explanation, I use model estimates from 1990 to predict the wage gap between natives and Asians in 2000 that can be attributed to competition from increased supply of substitutes. For each occupation, the predicted wage gap is larger than the real gap--the difference arises from gains in quality in the 1990s made possible by an immigration policy that favored high-skill labor. The third chapter looks at the impact of intermarriage on the labor market outcomes of Asian women, who are a rapidly growing group of immigrants in U.S.A. Marriage to a native is believed to boost labor market outcomes by encouraging human capital accumulation of immigrants (Meng & Gregory (2005)). However, any estimates of the effects of intermarriage are plagued by selection and endogeneity concerns. I correct for these problems by using two instrumental variables - the probability of marriage to a man from the same origin country versus a native and the sex ratio, both calculated for the woman's age group, metropolitan area and home country. The raw premium from intermarriage is positive for all immigrant women. Once biases are controlled for, intermarriage imposes a negative 5% wage penalty on immigrant women. The wage penalty is larger for intermarried Asian women; they earn 8-13% less than intra-married Asian women. The impact on market hours worked is always negative for all intermarried women, though smaller for Asian women. IV estimates are more negative than OLS estimates. Negative selection in unobservable characteristics is ruled out as a reason for the results. I investigate the idea that intermarrying Asian women have spouses with higher U.S.-specific human capital than their own and women reduce investments in the labor market due to an income effect from husband's earnings. Intermarriage penalties are seen to rise with husband's education. Additionally, looking at wage or hours assimilation for different cohorts of immigrant women differentiated by type of marriage, intermarried women are seen to have lower initial wages and higher hours, but higher wage and lower hours growth compared to intra-married women. Initial gaps are insignificant for the Asian subsample and growth is lower for intermarried women. Intermarried women take jobs with low pay and higher hours initially, and move to better jobs with their husband's help; this is not seen for Asians. In the fourth chapter, I use the Critical Period hypothesis to explain the gap in education achievement between immigrant and U.S.-born children. Entering the U.S. at a younger age provides exposure to U.S.-specific stimuli for immigrant children in their "critical periods", and this should aid their language development and, subsequently, educational achievement. The paper also looks at the effects of birthright citizenship separately from age-of-entry effects for U.S.-born children of immigrants by comparing them to siblings who arrived in the U.S. as infants. The OLS estimates of age-of-entry effects can be biased if parents factor the age of their children into their migration decision. I use a sample of siblings, ages 25 to 55, from the 2000 Census who either immigrated simultaneously at ages less than 18 or at least one is a child immigrant and the siblings are U.S.-born. Using a household fixed effects approach, I find that the relationship between language-acquisition or educational outcomes and age-of-entry is negative and convex. The critical age for learning English is 5. Education outcomes of teenage entrants are affected the worst. A child who enters at age one is 25% less likely of being a citizen compared to a native sibling. Birthright citizenship does not provide any significant advantages for education. In fact some young entrants may get more schooling than their U.S.-born sibling