The Economic Integration of Foreign-Educated Immigrants: A Test of Classical Assimilation.

Abstract

The economic integration of immigrants has been a much-studied topic in social science research, yet the research on high-skilled immigration has been scant. As the U.S. becomes increasingly reliant on foreign labor, foreign-trained immigrants may experience a very different adaptive pathway from the dominant assimilation paradigm. The stylized portrait of immigrant incorporation as posited by the classical assimilation framework has immigrants facing initial economic disadvantages. Through assimilation – the learning of host-country ways and practices – immigrants are expected to climb the socioeconomic ladder and eventually reach parity with natives. The main assumption is that Americanization is invariably better than retaining ethnic roots and once assimilated, upward mobility is inevitable. However, structural changes in the economy and the socioeconomic diversity of contemporary immigrants have called the classical assimilation paradigm into question. The overarching aim is to test whether classical assimilation is still a sweeping and necessary process for economic convergence. The disappearance of the persistent Asian-white earnings gap with the inclusion of place of education serves as the crux in motivating this research. When the location of one’s education is partitioned into foreign- or domestic-acquired, the between-race gap disappears, revealing a within-race disparity along the lines of place of education. What is it about foreign education that contributes to depressed earnings? This dissertation attempts to uncover the underlying mechanisms that link foreign education to lower earnings. To operationalize assimilation, this dissertation borrows the Gordonian understanding of assimilation – the sharing of norms and practices with natives. The more-assimilated do what the natives do, which in this case, is the acquisition of US-based education. Conversely, the less-assimilated are conceptualized to be the foreign-educated, who deviate from normative “American” behavior. The three essays explore the resilience of the foreign education penalty thesis in light of the current economy and the socioeconomic diversity within the contemporary immigrant pool. General findings indicate that foreign education is not universally penalized. For workers who have good skills, even in the absence of assimilation, they are able to reach economic convergence with their more-assimilated counterparts, rendering the high-skilled a particular threat to the classical assimilation thesis.