Immigrants and the labor Market

This paper deals with a number of issues about immigrants to the United States and their education. In part reflecting the reasons why they come in America, immigrants are more highly represented in both the lowest and highest rungs of the education ladder. On average immigrants have less schooling than the native born, a schooling deficit that reached 1.3 years in 2002. Perhaps as important as the average difference between immigrants and the native-born population, there is considerable diversity in the schooling accomplishments among different immigrant sub-groups. The education of new European and Asian immigrants is higher than that of native-born Americans, while the typical Latino immigrant continues to trail the native-born by about four years of schooling on average. The education gap of new recent immigrants did rise modestly over the last 60 years. This increase was higher among men than among women and is entirely accounted for the increasing fraction of immigrants who are illegal. Legal immigrants appear to have about the same amount of schooling as native-born Americans do, and in the top of the schooling hierarchy have a good deal more. Finally, I find that the concern that educational generational progress among Latino immigrants has lagged behind other immigrant groups is largely unfounded.