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National — and local — conversations about immigration are often centered on immigrants' integration into the US society. One factor that shapes immigrants' integration is their pre-migration work experience, skills, and training and a series of studies have used "channeling" as a concept to identify immigrants who have worked in the same occupation and/or industry in the destination labor market as they had in the origin labor market, prior to migration. Using the New Immigrant Survey (NIS) and a simultaneous equation model (SiEM) approach, this article expands on this research by exploring the impact of channeling on wages for Asian Indians, Filipino/as, and Mexicans with lawful permanent resident (LPR) status. Contrary to prior findings on the effects of channeling within specific industries, we find that channeling is associated with lower, not higher, immigrants' wages. The findings are robust to different definitions of channeling, as the negative effects of channeling hold within industrial sectors and occupational groups. Moreover, the results indicate that channeling is not exclusive to the Mexico–US migration stream, but instead may be a feature of various US-bound immigration streams, including those from India and the Philippines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1990s, Mexican immigration dispersed spatially, leading to the emergence of many "new destinations," in nonmetropolitan areas of the United States. Previous studies constrain the scope of the analysis to the United States, limiting our understanding of how new destinations are formed. We place new destination formation into a binational context and emphasize the role of supply-side immigration dynamics. We argue that occupations in Mexico provide ready-made paths, or "channels," for economic incorporation into the United States and that these channels underlie the formation of many new destinations. Using a unique data set on Mexican migration, we estimate a multivariate model that tests for the presence of occupational channels linking analogous sectors of the U.S. and Mexican economies, focusing especially on the food-processing sector. The results demonstrate that Mexican migration is strongly channeled along occupational lines. There are occupational channels linking each of the major economic sectors in Mexico and the United States, but the effect of channeling is particularly strong in the food-processing sector. By empirically identifying the existence of occupational channels, this study uncovers a key explanation of new destination formation in many nonmetropolitan areas.

Contemporary levels of international migration in less-developed countries are raising new and important questions regarding the consequences of immigration for human welfare and well-being. However, there is little systematic cross-national evidence of how international migration affects human development levels in migrant-receiving countries in the less-developed world. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by assessing the impact of cumulative international migration flows on the human development index, a composite measure of aggregate well-being. A series of panel models are estimated using a sample of less-developed countries for the period, 1970-2005. The results indicate that higher levels of international migration are associated with lower scores on the human development index, net of controls, but that the effect of international migration is relatively small.

It is widely argued that globalization and economic development are associated with international migration. However, these relationships have not been tested empirically. We use a cross-national empirical analysis to assess the impact of global and national factors on international migration from less-developed countries. An interdisciplinary analytical framework is developed. We then use several modeling techniques to analyze panel data on a set of less-developed countries from 1970 to 2000. Three central findings emerge from these analyses. First, foreign direct investment has a significant, differential effect across sectors of the economy: FDI in the primary sector increases the level of net emigration, while FDI in the secondary sector has a deterrent effect. Second, economic development has a significant, nonlinear effect on net emigration levels, the so-called "migration hump." Finally, we find a strong cumulative causation effect of migration, meaning that migration has a strong internal momentum after it has been initiated. The implications of the findings are discussed in the context of contemporary migration theory. (Contains 2 tables and 19 notes.)

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