Labor Market Outcomes of Immigrants in the United States.

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the labor market experiences of immigrants in the United States. Using cross-state variation in the provision of Medicaid for immigrants arriving after the 1996 welfare reform, the second chapter explores the effect of the reform’s five-year residence requirement on the health insurance and labor supply of recent immigrants. With data from the Current Population Survey and a difference-in-differences-in-trends specification, I find that the five-year residence requirement does not affect private health insurance coverage or labor supply among recent immigrants, but it does affect Medicaid coverage and overall health insurance coverage. The growth rate of overall health insurance coverage is twice as large for immigrants living in states that do not implement the five-year residence requirement. In the third chapter, I use data from the New Immigrant Survey to estimate the effect of becoming a permanent resident (receiving a green card) on the wages of immigrants whose green cards are sponsored by their employers. Employer-sponsored immigrants are tied to their employers while waiting for a green card but free to work for any employer once they become legal permanent residents. Native workers from the Current Population Survey serve a control group in the difference-in-differences propensity score matching strategy. I find that receiving a green card is accompanied by a 13 percent wage increase for employer-sponsored immigrants. In the fourth chapter, I use data from the Displaced Workers Survey to investigate how the effects of job displacement differ among natives, naturalized citizens, and non-citizens. Using a Weibull model, I find that naturalized citizens have significantly longer jobless spell duration than native workers following displacement. Using a two-stage Heckman model, I find that re-employment wages differ significantly between non-citizens and natives. However, because the pre-displacement wage gap between non-citizens and natives is even larger, I find that job loss actually narrows the wage gap between displaced non-citizen and native workers.