Inequality in the work visa approvals of U.S. immigrants

Thesis (S.M. in Management Research)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 38-43).This study examines how U.S. immigration policies, as implemented by agents acting on behalf of the federal government, shape migration and key employment outcomes of skilled foreign nationals. Using a unique dataset, which encompasses the entire population of 1,441,856 H-1B temporary work visa requests evaluated by government agents from May 2005 to April 2010, I assess whether agents' visa approval and denial decisions are shaped by immigrants' sending country characteristics. Through this program, government agents mediate a key institutional boundary: access to the U.S. labor market, by conferring or withholding "current" legal standing to potential immigrants. Controlling for important application evaluation criteria, I find that immigrant workers from sending countries with lower levels of economic development are less likely to receive approvals for initial and continuing employment requests, all else equal. Government agents' visa approvals may also shape career mobility among those immigrants previously granted legal standing through the evaluation of requests to change jobs or employers. In these evaluations, however, sending country level of economic development is not a statistically significant predictor of approval. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for theories of inequality and labor market mobility, in addition to practical considerations regarding the efficient and fair administration of immigration policy.by Ben A. Rissing.S.M.in Management Researc

Immigration, inequality, and the state : three essays on the employment of foreign nationals in the United States

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2013."September 2013." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references.This dissertation examines how U.S. immigration policies, as implemented by government agents, shape migration and key employment outcomes of foreign nationals. Using unique quantitative and qualitative data, never previously available outside the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (U.S. CIS) and U.S. Department of Labor (U.S. DoL), I assess agents' work legalization decisions that annually affect hundreds of thousands of workers. In so doing, I distinguish between competing theoretical accounts of labor market inequality and regulatory failure. In my first essay, I examine new U.S. CIS Freedom of Information Act data on the entire population of approved and denied H- 1B temporary work visas over a five year period. I find that immigrant workers from sending countries with lower levels of economic development are less likely to receive approvals for initial and continuing employment requests, all else equal. In support of social boundary theories, but not theories of preference-based inequality, I find no statistically significant differences in approval outcomes among those immigrants previously granted legal standing and seeking to change jobs or employers. In the second essay (co-authored with Professor Emilio J. Castilla), we examine quantitative data on the entire population of approved and denied labor certification requests, a key prerequisite for most employment-based green cards, evaluated by U.S. DoL agents over a 40 month period. We find that approvals differ significantly depending on immigrants' foreign citizenship, all else equal. Yet, and in support of statistical accounts of inequality, we find that approvals are equally likely for immigrant workers from the vast majority of citizenship groups when agents review audited applications with detailed employment information. In my final essay, I analyze qualitative data from U.S. DoL analysts charged with ensuring that the hiring of immigrant workers will not adversely affect the employment of U.S. citizens. In so doing, I explore why regulation may fail to achieve its desired outcome. In contrast to past work, I proposed that well-designed and faithfully-enacted regulation may produce inconsistent or ineffective outcomes when reliant on regulated actors' truthful accounts of their activities, resulting in "anomic regulation" that masks evaluation rules and constrains regulated actors' ability to improve compliance. 2by Ben A. Rissing.Ph.D

Complements or substitutes? Private codes, state regulation and the improvement of labor standards in global supply chains

Abstract Recent research on regulation and governance suggests that a mixture of publi

DS_10.1177_0001839218759965 – Supplemental material for Best in Class: The Returns on Application Endorsements in Higher Education

<p>Supplemental material, DS_10.1177_0001839218759965 for Best in Class: The Returns on Application Endorsements in Higher Education by Emilio J. Castilla and Ben A. Rissing in Administrative Science Quarterly</p

U.S.-Based Global Intellectual Property Creation: An Analysis

Summarizes an analysis of U.S. applications in the international Patent Cooperation Treaty database, with a focus on where innovation is occurring -- in which states, in which companies and universities, and in which technical areas