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Title: On Migrant Workers, the Interaction of Their Education and Ethnic Concentration, and Labor Market Outcomes

Citation Type: Dissertation/Thesis

Publication Year: 2023

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Abstract: While immigrants make up an increasing proportion of the U.S. labor force, there is little consensus on how ethnic concentration affects their labor market outcomes, and even less about the effect of the interaction between ethnic concentration and education. Higher levels of education increase both earnings and the likelihood of employment, but according to the literature, the effects of ethnic concentration seem to vary by the country of origin. Further difficulty is presented by the different definitions of ethnic concentration and ethnic enclaves used in the literature. I use individual-level data from 2016 for working-age immigrants throughout the entire U.S. to investigate the relationship between the interaction of education and ethnic concentration on employment and income of immigrant workers, which serves as an update of existing literature. Additionally, this paper is the first to focus on the interaction of education and ethnic concentration, rather than these two variables individually. Like previous literature, this study finds unambiguous positive effects of education on labor market outcomes, and positive effects of the interaction between education and living in an ethnic enclave: having a college degree and living in an ethnic enclave will increase an immigrant’s likelihood of being employed by anywhere between 22% and 26%. No statistically significant effect of the interaction on earnings was found.

Url: https://www.proquest.com/docview/2808111552?pq-origsite=gscholar&fromopenview=true

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Authors: Schneider, Ilya

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Department: Georgetown University

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Pages: 1-109

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Education, Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Race and Ethnicity

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