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Title: Does Immigration Crowd Natives Into or Out of Higher Education?
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2009
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Abstract: This paper examines how inows of immigrant students and immigrant labor a ect the post-secondary enrollment of natives. Existing studies have focused on the e ect of increased immi-grant demand for schooling in the education market on native enrollment. However, such analysisomits the e ect that changes in immigrant labor supply in the labor market also have on pricesrelevant to native enrollment decisions. I propose, in a uni ed framework, that immigration-induced price movements in both education and labor markets that change the private returnto higher education are mechanisms that can motivate native enrollment responses. Using U.S.Census microdata from 1970 to 2000, I estimate the causal impact of heterogeneous immigrantinows into local markets on the rate of native college enrollment in those areas. To isolate theexogenous component of immigrant inows from endogenous ows that vary with unobservedmovements in labor demand and college supply, I utilize a logit model of immigrant college de-mand combined with two-stage least squares estimation that exploits geographic variation inhistorical immigrant enclaves. I nd that a 1 percent increase in relatively unskilled immigrantlabor raises the rate of native college enrollment by 0.33 percent, while a 1 percent increase inimmigrant college students does not signi cantly lower enrollment. The positive, crowd-in e ectof immigrant labor inows is driven primarily by natives ages 18-24, consistent with younger na-tives having college demand that is more sensitive to returns than the demand of older natives.The results imply that the rise in the average college enrollment rate of young natives between1970 and 2000 would have been 18 percentage points higher if the skill composition of immigrantlabor inows had remained constant over this period. With the identi cation of a crowd-in e ectand, contrary to prior studies, the lack of a signi cant crowd-out e ect, these ndings provideevidence on how immigrants impact market prices and how natives respond to immigration.
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Authors: Jackson, Osborne
Publisher: University of Michigan
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Education, Migration and Immigration
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