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Title: Earnings Differentials and Assimilation of High-Skilled Immigration in the United States: A Study of Foreign-born Taiwanese
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2009
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Abstract: This paper uses microdata on the foreign born from the 1990 and 2000 U.S. censuses to examine the growing earnings differentials and immigrant assimilation in the U.S. labor market. Borjas (1985, 1995) uses the 1970, 1980 and 1990 censuses and found the earnings differentials were rising among all immigrants. I found the same trend of growing differentials for all foreign born from 1990 to 2000.Much of the literature on immigrant assimilation has emphasized low-end education immigrants. Borjas and Friedberg (2008) found evidence which reveals the turnaround in the relative earnings of new immigrants in 2000 occurred primarily at the top and the bottom ends of the skill distribution. This paper looks at a group of immigrants that generally has high labor market skills, foreign-born Taiwanese, to see how they have fared during this period of growing differentials. By decomposing earnings differentials, I find the better endowments of foreign-born Taiwanese, especially higher education, can explain the earnings gap between foreign-born Taiwanese and the all foreign-born. The high percent U.S. obtained post-college degrees of foreign-born Taiwanese seems to indicate a successful assimilation, in which skills are learned in U.S. instead of the origin country. Synthetic cohort analysis shows a reverse pattern that since 1990 the within census earnings differentials of the new arriving cohort of foreign-born Taiwanese earned more than did earlier cohorts. Hence, my findings can help to explain the polarization of earnings differentials in the U.S. labor market since 1990 (Autor, Katz and Kearney (2005), Lemieux (2007)) and the turnaround in the relative earnings of new immigrants in 2000 (Borjas and Friedberg (2008)), particularly at the top-end.
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Authors: Lin, Carl
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Migration and Immigration
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