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Abstract:
Highly-skilled migrants are becoming a more important part of the world economy and of policy debates in a diverse set of countries. The proliferation of skills around the world, increases in world trade, the growth of R&D, and the general increase in the labor market demand for diverse sets of skills, have all contributed to the emergence of high-skilled migration as a major issue. High-skilled migration is often discussed in narrow terms of "brain drain/brain gain", when both the pattern of migration and its effects appear to be much more complex. However, our understanding of the effects of high skilled migration is much less than for international migration in general, and is based upon much less research and data. This paper reviews the possible effects of high skilled international migration, and the major research and policy questions that need answering.

Migration, Skilled Labor, Doctorate, Brain Drain

Abstract:
The labor market "quality" of immigrants is a subject of debate among immigration researchers, and a major public policy concern. However, traditional methods of measuring human capital are particularly difficult to apply to recently arrived immigrants. Many factors that have a negative effect on entry earnings also increase either the incentive or the opportunity for faster human capital investment and earning growth. In addition, many country-of-origin acquired skills that are not immediately valued in the U.S. labor market are useful to the acquisition of U.S. skills. Thus entry earnings are not a good measure of the stock of immigrant human capital. This article presents a model of immigrant human capital investment and, using 1970-1990 census data, presents strong evidence of a systematic and important inverse relationship between initial immigrant earnings and subsequent earnings growth. This result - which persists even after accounting for differences in the immigration flows from different countries, sampling error, and the effects of emigration - is fundamentally different from both earlier cross-sectional estimates and more recent pooled models that constrain cohort growth rates to be equal. Although our model provides theoretical support for an inverse relationship only when source country human capital is held constant, faster earnings growth for low-entry-earnings immigrants is found empirically even when age and education are not controlled for. The immigrant human capital investment model presented here explores general principles that may apply to other labor market transitions that involve skill transferability - including occupational change and labor market reentry.

Immigration, Migration, Human Capital Investment, Skill Transferability, Assimilation

Abstract:
There has been an ongoing concern about the productivity of kinship-based immigrants in the U.S. labor market. Despite the policy importance of this issue, little empirical or theoretical attention has been devoted to learning the effect of different admission criteria on immigrants' economic performance. To estimate the effect of admission criteria on immigrant earnings profiles we use 1980 census data on individuals matched to Immigration and Naturalization Service information on admission criteria for country-of-origin/year-of-entry immigrant cohorts. We find that non-occupation-based immigration, most of which is family-based, is associated with lower entry earnings but higher earnings growth than occupation-based immigration. The higher estimated earnings growth is sufficient for non-occupation based immigrants to catch up with occupationally admitted immigrants after 11 to 18 years in the United States.

Abstract:
Cross-sectional estimates of immigrant wage growth have painted an optimistic picture of the ability of immigrants to adapt to the U.S. labor market in that studies using cross-sectional data have generally found immigrant wage growth to exceed that of the native born. This optimistic picture of immigrant economic assimilation was shattered by the important finding that recent immigrants were starting at much lower wages than was true of earlier immigrant cohorts. As such, the high wage growth of immigrants relative to the native born measured in cross-sectional data may simply be the spurious result of declining immigrant earnings ability. In this paper, we match Current Population Survey samples so that the wages of individual immigrant and native-born men can be followed for one year. This approach will become an increasingly useful tool for studying immigrant labor market behavior with the recent commencement of immigrant identification on all CPS surveys. Using matched CPS samples, we find that the wage growth of immigrants exceeds that of the native born. In 1988, the median annual wage growth of immigrants was 6.7% compared with 4.4% for workers born in the United States. We also find that the wage growth measured by following individuals closely parallels the projected wage growth based on a cross-sectional estimation. This similarity suggests that either there is no cohort quality bias in the cross-sectional estimates of immigrant wage growth or that there has been a coincidental increase in immigrant wage growth as the entry wages of immigrants have fallen.

Abstract:
By measuring the earnings growth of immigrant cohorts across the 1960-1980 censuses, we test two potential hypotheses for the decline in the education-adjusted entry earnings of immigrants. One hypothesis suggests that the decline has been caused by the immigration of lower ability immigrants: a result of the relatively unequal income distributions of the source countries currently dominating U.S. immigration. Another hypothesis is that the decline in immigrant entry earnings reflects a change in the extent to which immigrant skills are transferable to the United States. Our cohort analyses provide indirect evidence for the skills transferability hypothesis. We also introduce subsampling techniques that researchers may use to test the sensitivity of cohort-based results to biases caused by sampling error and immigration.

Abstract:
Recent immigrants to the United States are starting their economic lives at substantially lower earnings than previous cohorts of immigrants, even after adjusting for inter-cohort differences in education. The decline in education adjusted earnings--attributed to high family admissions and changes in the country-of-origin composition of U.S. immigrants--has fostered concerns about the "quality" of recent immigrants and motivated changes in U.S. immigration law as well as calls for further change. The importance of these concerns depends upon whether immigrants starting with low earnings remain at a disadvantage throughout their working lives. This paper summarizes our research concerning the relationship between immigrant entry earnings and earnings growth and the effect on immigrant earnings growth of kinship admission and country of origin. Using 1960-1990 decennial census data, we find that for cohorts from the same country of origin, education group, and age group, there is a systematic inverse relationship between initial earnings and subsequent earnings growth. With regard to the effect of greater admissions on the basis of kinship, we find that declines in admissions on the basis of occupational skills and corresponding increases in admissions on the basis of family are associated with both a decrease in initial earnings and an increase in earnings growth. Finally, we find that the earnings of demographically comparable immigrants, regardless of country of origin, converge with time in the United States. All of these findings suggest that immigrant entry earnings and earnings growth are jointly determined and inversely related.