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This article brings together a range of data sources to chart cohort change in the human capital characteristics of Pakistani immigrants to the United Kingdom over the last fifty years. We demonstrate how restrictions on labor migration and family reunification have transformed characteristics of new arrivals while still maintaining some elements of chain migration patterns. Despite these changes, we note substantial consistency in the sociocultural characteristics of Pakistani-origin U.K. residents across cohorts, specifically in identity, religiosity, and social networks. We reflect on the implications of these patterns of change and continuity.

Recent research on economic returns to higher education in the United States suggests that those with the highest wage returns to a college degree are least likely to obtain one. We extend the study of heterogeneous returns to tertiary education across multiple institutional contexts, investigating how the relationship between wage returns and the propensity to complete a degree varies by the level of expansion, differentiation, and cost of higher education. Drawing on panel data and matching techniques, we compare findings from the US with selection into degree completion in Germany and the UK. Contrary to previous studies, we find little evidence for population level heterogeneity in economic returns to higher education.

In this article, we examine the political socialization process in immigrant families based on the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS). We find that international migration disrupts the intergenerational transmission of political engagement: associations between voting, political interest, and parent and child socioeconomic status are weaker in immigrant families than in families without a migration background. In particular, the voting behavior of immigrants and their children in particular is only partially explained by standard models of political socialization. In contrast, characteristics specific to the international migration process, including sending country experiences, characteristics of the migration journey, and the pathway to citizenship are critical determinants of voting for immigrant parents, and through political socialization, for their UK-raised children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter provides an overview of the intergenerational progress of several major immigrant groups in the United States. Drawing on the most recent issues of the CPS, we provide estimates of poverty rates, educational attainment, and occupational attainment among the native born children of immigrants and compare these outcomes to similar estimates of the foreign born with the 1980 Census, allowing for a comparison across generations. We find improvement from the first to second generation for nearly every origin group. To more directly explore the transmission of socioeconomic status among immigrants, we directly link the parental and child outcomes of immigrants in Los Angeles, estimating the relationship between parents’ and children’s educational and occupational outcomes. We find considerable variation in the relationship between parent and child outcomes by origin group, although all immigrants show higher rates of intergenerational mobility than the children of the native born. Traditional assimilation models, as well as the alternative working class and selectivity hypotheses we pose here, do not fully explain these inter-ethnic differences.

We evaluate recent revisions of assimilation theory by comparing the labor market performance of Mexican immigrants and their descendents to those of native white and Black Americans. Using unique data from the CPS Contingent Worker Series, we measure the employment sector distribution, fringe benefits, and earnings of four Mexican foreign born cohorts, second generation, and third generation Mexican Americans. We find little evidence that Mexican Americans are clustered in nonstandard work, noting instead improvement in benefits and pay amongst older cohorts and the second and third generation. However, all Mexican origin workers are disadvantaged relative to native whites in terms of benefits. It is only within the public sector that the labor market outcomes of Mexican origin workers fully converge with native whites.