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Although immigrants to the United States earn less at entry than their native-born counterparts, an extensive literature has found that immigrants have faster earnings growth that results in rapid convergence to native-born earnings. However, recent evidence based on U.S. Census data indicates a slowdown in the rate of earnings assimilation. We find that the pace of immigrant wage convergence based on recent data may be understated in the literature as a result of the method used by the census to impute missing information on earnings, which does not use immigration status as a match characteristic. Because both the share of immigrants in the workforce and earnings imputation rates have risen over time, imputation match bias for recent immigrants is more consequential than in earlier periods and may lead to an underestimate of the rate of immigrant wage convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study interviewed 350 African immigrants in North Carolina (NC) to shed light on their economic conditions. It focused primarily on their labor force participation and incomes for the period 2004-2014. The findings showed that both structural changes in NC's economy and prejudicial experiences within the labor force were the most important forces that undermined the economic ambitions of the Africans. The study also yielded a complex picture and raised some questions about the resettlement outcome of African immigrants in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although women's representation among international migrants in many countries has risen over the last 100 years, we know far less about gender gaps in the labor force participation of immigrants across a wide span of host societies. Prior studies have established that immigrant women are doubly disadvantaged in terms of labor market outcomes in the U.S., Canada, and Israel. These studies suggest an intriguing question: Are there gender gaps in immigrant labor force participation across destinations countries? In this paper, we investigate the extent to which the double disadvantage exists for immigrant women in a variety of host countries. We also examine how marriage moderates this double disadvantage. For the U.S., although we find that immigrant women have had the lowest labor force participation rates compared to natives and immigrant men since 1960, marital status is an important stratifying attribute that helps explain nativity differences. Extending the analysis to eight other countries reveals strong gender differences in labor force participation and shows how marriage differentiates immigrant women's labor force entry more so than men's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A significant number of immigrants fail to realise their full potential in the US labour markets, as evidenced by those working in occupations requiring skill levels far below their own level of education. While previous studies have studied immigrant underemployment with a focus on individual labour force characteristics, the spatial dimensions of immigrant underemployment have been largely overlooked. Using microdata from the 2006–2010 American Community Survey and a multilevel research design, this study examines the interaction of metropolitan labour market characteristics with individual labour force’s underemployment experiences, and explores how these interaction effects differ between the foreign-born and the native-born. Results suggest that the probability of individual labour force’s underemployment within any metropolitan area is highly contingent on metropolitan labour market characteristics including ethnic diversity, the proportion of its foreign-born population, the economic structure, and the level of educational attainment of the labour force, in addition to individual characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the extent to which unskilled internal migrants in the United States were motivated by the possibility of upward occupational mobility. Drawing on the literature on contemporary migrant selection and sorting, I argue that workers with greater potential for occupational upgrading may have selected themselves out of counties with low skill premiums and sorted themselves into counties with high skill premiums. Using linked data from the U.S. Census and county-level wage data, I present results consistent with this argument, with a focus on shorter distance movers. Conditioning on migrant status, I find that unskilled migrants who moved to places with high skill premiums were most likely to upgrade. 1 offer some evidence that migrant sorting explains much of this result. My results imply that previous research focusing solely on wage gains provides an incomplete picture of the factors motivating east-west migration in nineteenth century America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the economic repercussions of the U.S. government's granting amnesty to illegal immigrants since the passage of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). Economic consequences, including an increase of tax revenues, the improvement of the economic conditions of immigrant families, the loss of a cheap, flexible workforce and an increase of government transfers, are discussed. An overview of the history of U.S government policy towards illegal immigrants, including the 1996 Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the 1997 Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act (NACARA), is presented.

The article offers information on the aspects of immigration and economy in the U.S. It states that the different inflows of immigrants through the states since 1960 served as a procurator for counterfactual levels of immigration. It notes that the state-specific effects that may attrack immigrants since they attracted migrants in general. Moreover, it points out that statistical tests show that both employment and hours every worker were not affected in the short term by employing the immigrants.