Immigration and Within-group Wage Inequality


Book Description

The rhetoric against immigration in the United States mostly focuses on the economic threat to low-educated native-born men using a singular labor market competition lens. In contrast to this trend, this dissertation builds on a large body of previous work on job queuing and ethnic competition, as well as insights gained from the studies on female labor force participation and the outsourcing of care work. By exploring regional differences in the wage effects of immigration across 100 metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2007, I argue that immigration is an intersectionally dynamic localized source of wage inequality and equality. The first chapter provides an overview of the current literature concerning the wage effects of immigration on native-born workers. The second chapter asks empirically whether immigration is related to regional differences in the gender wage gap, and finds that the gap is narrower in cities with higher concentrations of migrant domestic workers. In chapter three, I focus on native-born women only and investigate how within-women inequalities are mediated, unchanged, or sustained through immigration by race, class and motherhood. In the fourth chapter, I discuss the benefits and limitations of fixed- and random-effects models, and advocate for the use of hybrid-effects models for intersectional scholars who consider social inequality to be a multidimensional experience across time and space. Ultimately, I conclude that the wage effects of immigration are the result of gendered, raced and classed queuing processes, as well as changes in household production decisions. Findings presented in this dissertation advance empirical and theoretical debates on the linkage between immigration and within-country wage inequality by arguing that the wage effects of immigration are intersectionally dynamic. The policy implications of my dissertation are twofold. First, the binary treatment of native-born workers against immigrants is misguided because immigration intersects with other sources of inequality. Secondly, the continued reliance on the market-based care, as opposed to publicly provided care, increases the labor market vulnerability of some native-born workers.




Relational Inequalities


Book Description

Organizations are the dominant social invention for generating resources and distributing them. Relational Inequalities develops a general sociological and organizational analysis of inequality, exploring the processes that generate inequalities in access to respect, resources, and rewards. Framing their analysis through a relational account of social and economic life, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey and Dustin Avent-Holt explain how resources are generated and distributed both within and between organizations. They show that inequalities are produced through generic processes that occur in all social relationships: categorization and their resulting status hierarchies, organizational resource pooling, exploitation, social closure, and claims-making. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt focus on the workplace as the primary organization for generating inequality and provide a series of global goals to advance both a comparative organizational research model and to challenge troubling inequalities.




The Economics of Immigration and Social Diversity


Book Description

Part of "The Research in Labor Economics" series, this volume is a collection of papers dedicated to the memory of the late Tikva Lecker. Professor Lecker's many interests included topics in labor economics, women and the economy, the economics of Judaism, the economics of migration and the economic experience of immigrants and their descendants.




A Spatial Analysis of Wage Inequality Among Foreign-born Workers in U.S. Metropolitan Areas


Book Description

This dissertation extends and connects prior research on wage inequality and immigration to the U.S. Focusing on evidences derived from cross-metropolitan comparisons, it finds unique temporal trends and spatial patterns of wage inequality among immigrant workers, identifies wage differentials among immigrant groups by individual characteristics, and evaluates the roles of different labor market conditions in determining changes in immigrant wage inequality and their spatial variations. These findings point to the fact that race and ethnicity and geography are two key factors in understanding immigrant wage inequality. While race and ethnicity play an increasingly important role in determining wage disparities among immigrant workers, wage inequality of immigrant workers also depends on their settlement patterns and labor market conditions in their destinations. Wage inequality among immigrants in the U.S. is a function of different types of metropolitan areas, which serve as urban contexts to accommodate racial and ethnic concentration of immigrant workers and their divergent historical economic incorporation. Using the Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample (IPUMS) data of the Decennial Census for the years 1980, 1990, 2000 and pooled 5-year ACS data in 2009, my empirical analysis shows that immigrants had wider wage gap and higher rates of inequality growth during the past three decades than the native-born workers in the U.S. There was great heterogeneity in urban wage inequality among immigrant workers. But all metropolitan areas experienced a rapid growth in wage inequality since 1980. A decomposition of wage inequality of the overall labor force in the U.S. by nativity shows that immigrant wage inequality and their local income shares both had an impact on the contribution of immigrant wage inequality to wage inequality of the overall labor force. An examination of immigrant wage differentials between educational and racial and ethnic groups finds rapid growths in three-decade wage gaps between college graduates and high-school dropouts and that between White and Hispanic foreign-born workers. Among different sources of growth in immigrant wage inequality, the contribution of residual wage inequality declined moderately while the contribution of race and ethnicity continued to grow rapidly during the past three decades. Finally, focusing on labor market level attributes, panel regression models suggest that city population size, R & D spending, structural shifts from manufacturing to services employment, de-unionization in the labor force all contributed significantly to changes in overall and residual wage inequality among both male and female immigrant workers in U.S. metropolitan areas. To certain extent, geography also explained inter-metropolitan variations in overall wage inequality and in residual wage inequality among immigrant workers. For both genders, wage inequalities among immigrant workers tended to be lower in former immigrant gateway metros than in low-immigrant metros. Major-continuous gateway cities were more likely to have significantly higher levels of residual wage inequality among male immigrant workers than low-immigrant metropolitan areas.




Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality


Book Description

The rapid rise in the proportion of foreign-born residents in the United States since the mid-1960s is one of the most important demographic events of the past fifty years. The increase in immigration, especially among the less-skilled and less-educated, has prompted fears that the newcomers may have depressed the wages and employment of the native-born, burdened state and local budgets, and slowed the U.S. economy as a whole. Would the poverty rate be lower in the absence of immigration? How does the undocumented status of an increasing segment of the foreign-born population impact wages in the United States? In Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality, noted labor economists David Card and Steven Raphael and an interdisciplinary team of scholars provide a comprehensive assessment of the costs and benefits of the latest era of immigration to the United States Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality rigorously explores shifts in population trends, labor market competition, and socioeconomic segregation to investigate how the recent rise in immigration affects economic disadvantage in the United States. Giovanni Peri analyzes the changing skill composition of immigrants to the United States over the past two decades to assess their impact on the labor market outcomes of native-born workers. Despite concerns over labor market competition, he shows that the overall effect has been benign for most native groups. Moreover, immigration appears to have had negligible impacts on native poverty rates. Ethan Lewis examines whether differences in English proficiency explain this lack of competition between immigrant and native-born workers. He finds that parallel Spanish-speaking labor markets emerge in areas where Spanish speakers are sufficiently numerous, thereby limiting the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born residents. While the increase in the number of immigrants may not necessarily hurt the job prospects of native-born workers, low-skilled migration appears to suppress the wages of immigrants themselves. Michael Stoll shows that linguistic isolation and residential crowding in specific metropolitan areas has contributed to high poverty rates among immigrants. Have these economic disadvantages among low-skilled immigrants increased their dependence on the U.S. social safety net? Marianne Bitler and Hilary Hoynes analyze the consequences of welfare reform, which limited eligibility for major cash assistance programs. Their analysis documents sizable declines in program participation for foreign-born families since the 1990s and suggests that the safety net has become less effective in lowering child poverty among immigrant households. As the debate over immigration reform reemerges on the national agenda, Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality provides a timely and authoritative review of the immigrant experience in the United States. With its wealth of data and intriguing hypotheses, the volume is an essential addition to the field of immigration studies. A Volume in the National Poverty Center Series on Poverty and Public Policy




Immigration and Inequality


Book Description

Immigration is often viewed as a proximate cause of the rising wage gap between high- and low-skilled workers. Nevertheless, there is controversy over the appropriate framework for measuring the presumed effect, and over the magnitudes involved. This paper offers an overview and synthesis of existing knowledge on the relationship between immigration and inequality, focusing on evidence from cross-city comparisons in the U.S. Although some researchers have argued that a cross-city research design is inherently flawed, I show that evidence from cross-city comparisons is remarkably consistent with recent findings from aggregate time series data. Both designs provide support for three key conclusions: (1) workers with below high school education are perfect substitutes for those with a high school education; (2)"high school equivalent" and "college equivalent" workers are imperfect substitutes; (3) within education groups, immigrants and natives are imperfect substitutes. Together these results imply that the impacts of recent immigrant inflows on the relative wages of U.S. natives are small. The effects on overall wage inequality (including natives and immigrants) are larger, reflecting the concentration of immigrants in the tails of the skill distribution and higher residual inequality among immigrants than natives. Even so, immigration accounts for a small share (5%) of the increase in U.S. wage inequality between 1980 and 2000.




Cato Handbook for Policymakers


Book Description

Offers policy recommendations from Cato Institute experts on every major policy issue. Providing both in-depth analysis and concrete recommendations, the Handbook is an invaluable resource for policymakers and anyone else interested in securing liberty through limited government.




The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration


Book Description

The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration finds that the long-term impact of immigration on the wages and employment of native-born workers overall is very small, and that any negative impacts are most likely to be found for prior immigrants or native-born high school dropouts. First-generation immigrants are more costly to governments than are the native-born, but the second generation are among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the U.S. This report concludes that immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the U.S. More than 40 million people living in the United States were born in other countries, and almost an equal number have at least one foreign-born parent. Together, the first generation (foreign-born) and second generation (children of the foreign-born) comprise almost one in four Americans. It comes as little surprise, then, that many U.S. residents view immigration as a major policy issue facing the nation. Not only does immigration affect the environment in which everyone lives, learns, and works, but it also interacts with nearly every policy area of concern, from jobs and the economy, education, and health care, to federal, state, and local government budgets. The changing patterns of immigration and the evolving consequences for American society, institutions, and the economy continue to fuel public policy debate that plays out at the national, state, and local levels. The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration assesses the impact of dynamic immigration processes on economic and fiscal outcomes for the United States, a major destination of world population movements. This report will be a fundamental resource for policy makers and law makers at the federal, state, and local levels but extends to the general public, nongovernmental organizations, the business community, educational institutions, and the research community.




Essays on Wage Inequality


Book Description

This thesis focuses on the role of composition, immigration and the cost-of-living on wage inequality. I begin by investigating to what extent changing characteristics of the labour force can help explain the fact that residual or within-group wage inequality - wage dispersion among workers with the same education and experience - is generally thought to account for most of the growth in wage inequality observed in several industrialised countries over the last thirty years. I compare the results for men and women in Italy, the UK, and the US from 1987 to 2003 or 2004. I find that even though residual does account for most of the wage variation in all countries, there is no common increasing trend in residual inequality. I also find that workforce composition does not always act to increase the residual wage inequality. In the second part of the thesis, I investigate the effects of immigration on residual wage inequality in the UK and the US between 1994 and 2008, by assessing whether and to what degree immigration contributed, along with technology, institutions and traditional explanations, to widening inequality. The analysis reveals that residual wage inequality is higher amongst immigrants than amongst natives. However, such differences do not contribute (much) to the increasing residual wage inequality observed in the two countries. The final section of this thesis questions how existing estimates of inequality change when differences in the cost-of-living and the differential concentrations of individuals with different levels of education across regions are taken into account. I focus on changes in the difference in the hourly wage for workers with a college degree and high school degree in the UK between 1997 and 2008. Results show that the national RPI underestimates the cost-of-living of workers living in the most expensive regions (London, South East) and overestimates the cost-of-living for "cheaper" regions (Northern Ireland, Scotland). When deflating hourly wages by the regional RPI, the average level of wages is lower, by 8% to 11% an hour for all workers in London and the South East, whilst it is higher, by around 2% to 9% in the remaining regions; similarly the level, but not changes, in wage inequality is lower when deflating by the real regional RPI.




Inequality and Immigration


Book Description

This chapter investigates the relationship between immigration and inequality in the UK over the past 40 years. This is a period when the share of foreign-born in the UK population increased from 5.3% in 1975 to 13.4% in 2015. We evaluate the impact immigration had on wage inequality in the UK through two channels: the first is the effect on the earnings distribution of natives and the second is the effect on the composition of the wage-earning population. We find both effects to be very small. We decompose wage inequality into inequality within the immigrant and native groups and inequality between the two groups. We find inequality among immigrants to be consistently higher than inequality among natives. We also examine the impact of immigration on the fiscal budget, and the potentially unequal impact of the ensuing tax implications on natives. In the UK, where immigrants are net fiscal contributors, this is not a factor that aggravates economic inequality. Even though the impact of immigration is found to be small, the way it is perceived across different population groups in the UK varies; a fact mostly attributed to racial and cultural concerns rather than perceived economic competition.