Research and Policy Issues in High-Skilled International Migration: A Perspective with Data from the United States

Highly-skilled migrants are becoming a more important part of the world economy and of policy debates in a diverse set of countries. The proliferation of skills around the world, increases in world trade, the growth of R&D, and the general increase in the labor market demand for diverse sets of skills, have all contributed to the emergence of high-skilled migration as a major issue. High-skilled migration is often discussed in narrow terms of ?brain drain/brain gain?, when both the pattern of migration and its effects appear to be much more complex. However, our understanding of the effects of high skilled migration is much less than for international migration in general, and is based upon much less research and data. This paper reviews the possible effects of high skilled international migration, and the major research and policy questions that need answering

Research issues in the international migration of highly skilled workers: a perspective with data from the United States

This paper provides a checklist and discussion of the benefits and cost of highly skilled migrants for both sending and receiving countries. When possible it tries to analyse or illustrate these nation-level benefits and costs using data on scientists and engineers in the U.S. labor market or in U.S. graduate education. In contrast to discussions of "brain drain", it is clear that there are many benefits of high-skill migration for sending countries, as well as some negatives for receiving countries. In addition, the greatest gains from migration may not occur at the nation-state level, but globally from gains in knowledge transfer and efficiency

The civil rights act and the earnings of lower income Hispanic men in the 1960's

This paper uses Social Security longitudinal earnings records matched to Current Population Survey data to examine changes in the relative earnings of Hispanic men during a period of dramatic change in public and private policies toward race and ethnicity characterized by, but not limited to, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Our principle focus is to compare and contrast how lower income Hispanic and African-American men fared during the civil rights era relative to lower-income non-Hispanic whites. Although previous studies have analyzed black economic progress using annual data before and after the Civil Rights Act, this is the first study to do so for Hispanics. We follow a longitudinal sample of individuals who were in the labor market before and after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Following the same individuals holds constant an array of unmeasured variables such as labor force selectivity and schooling quality that may correlate with the post-1964 period; our approach addresses concerns that the results are the product of changes in these variables. Of particular note - we uncover a significant acceleration following the Civil Rights Act in the relative earnings of low-income Hispanic men

Should the U.S. Continue Its Family-Friendly Immigration Policy?

An ongoing debate is whether the U.S. should continue its family-based admission system, which favors visas for family members of U.S. citizens and residents, or adopt a more skills-based system, replacing family visas with employment-based visas. In many ways this is a false dichotomy: family-friendly policies attract highly-skilled immigrants regardless of their own visa path, and there are not strong reasons why a loosening of restrictions on employment migrants need be accompanied by new restrictions on family-based immigration. Moreover, it is misleading to think that only employment-based immigrants contribute to the U.S. economy. Recent immigrants, who have mostly entered via kinship ties, are economically productive, a fact hidden by a flawed methodology that underlies most economic analyses of immigrant economic assimilation

Country of Origin and Immigrant Earnings, 1960-2000: A Human Capital Investment Perspective

Using microdata from the 1960-2000 decennial censuses, this paper explores how large initial differences in immigrant earnings by country of origin change with duration in the United States. One analysis reveals that country of origin adds less to the explanation of earnings, among working-age adult male immigrants, the longer they reside in the United States. Another discovers that the earnings dispersion of demographically comparable immigrants across countries of origin diminishes with time in the United States. Both indicate convergence in immigrant earnings by country of origin. To probe the sensitivity of these results to immigrant emigration, we pursue a theoretical analysis, which gauges how hypothetical patterns of selective emigration affect the convergence results, and an empirical analysis, which could be more broadly applied as a test for emigration bias. Both suggest that immigrant earnings convergence by country of origin is not an artifact of emigration. The convergence has methodological ramifications for the measurement of immigrant economic assimilation in studies that follow cohorts and in studies that follow individuals with longitudinal data and more generally for the study of any process in which unmeasured variables jointly affect initial conditions and subsequent growth

The Elusive Concept of Immigrant Quality: Evidence from 1970-1990

The labor market "quality" of immigrants is a subject of debate among immigration researchers, and a major public policy concern. However, traditional methods of measuring human capital are particularly difficult to apply to recently arrived immigrants. Many factors that have a negative effect on entry earnings also increase either the incentive or the opportunity for faster human capital investment and earning growth. In addition, many country-of-origin acquired skills that are not immediately valued in the U.S. labor market are useful to the acquisition of U.S. skills. Thus entry earnings are not a good measure of the stock of immigrant human capital. This article presents a model of immigrant human capital investment and, using 1970-1990 census data, presents strong evidence of a systematic and important inverse relationship between initial immigrant earnings and subsequent earnings growth. This result – which persists even after accounting for differences in the immigration flows from different countries, sampling error, and the effects of emigration – is fundamentally different from both earlier cross-sectional estimates and more recent pooled models that constrain cohort growth rates to be equal. Although our model provides theoretical support for an inverse relationship only when source country human capital is held constant, faster earnings growth for low-entry-earnings immigrants is found empirically even when age and education are not controlled for. The immigrant human capital investment model presented here explores general principles that may apply to other labor market transitions that involve skill transferability – including occupational change and labor market reentry

How immigration may affect US native entrepreneurship: Theoretical building blocks and preliminary results

This paper describes the theoretical underpinnings and provides empirical evidence for a model that predicts a positive impact of immigration on entrepreneurial activity. Immigrants, we hypothesize, facilitate innovation and entrepreneurship by being willing and able to invest in new skills. At the heart of this theoretical prediction is the observation that human capital not immediately valued in the U.S. labor market is useful for learning new skills. Because immigrants face a lower opportunity cost of investing in new skills or methods, this transfer of source-specific skills to the U.S. may lead immigrants to be more flexible in their human capital investments than observationally equivalent natives. Areas with large numbers of immigrants (even if they are not self-employed) may prove to be areas in which entrepreneurship and innovation are easier to accomplish. Our theory offers a unique perspective on the contributions of immigrants to economic development beyond traditional perspectives that focus on low-cost immigrant labor or immigrant entrepreneurship

Family-friendly and human-capital-based immigration policy

Immigrants who start with low earnings, such as family-based immigrants, experience higher earnings growth than immigrants who are recruited for specific jobs (employment-based immigrants). This occurs because family-based immigrants with lower initial earnings invest in human capital at higher rates than natives or employment-based immigrants. Therefore, immigrants who start at low initial earnings invest in new human capital that allows them to respond to the ever-changing needs of the host country’s economy