This paper studies long-term trends in the labor market performance of immigrants in the United States, using the 1960-2000 PUMS and 1994-2009 CPS. While there was a continuous decline in the earnings of new immigrants 1960-1990, the trend reversed in the 1990s, with newcomers doing as well in...

This paper studies the role of the family in determining the skill composition and labor market experiences of immigrants in the United States. Our theoretical framework, based on the assumption that family migration decisions maximize household income, shows that the family attenuates the...

Over 12 million persons migrated to Canada or the United States between 1959 and 1981. Beginning in the mid?1960s, the immigration policies of the two countries began to diverge considerably: the United States stressing family reunification and Canada stressing skills. This paper shows that the...

This paper documents the extent to which immigrants participate in the many programs that make up the welfare state. The immigrant- native difference in the probability of receiving cash benefits is small, but the gap widens once other programs are included in the analysis: 21 percent of...

In the 1980s, the wages and employment rates of less-skilled Americans fell relative to those of more-skilled workers. This paper examines the contribution of the continuing inflow of less-skilled immigrants and the increasing importance of imports in the U.S. economy to these trends. Our...

We examine the relationship between immigration and attitudes toward redistribution using a newly assembled data set of immigrant stocks for 140 regions of 16 Western European countries. Exploiting within-country variations in the share of immigrants at the regional level, we find that native...

The ultimate impact of immigration on the United States obviously depends not only on the economic, social, political, and cultural shifts that take place during the life cycle of the immigrant population, but also on the adjustment process experienced by the immigrant household across...

Although economic theory predicts an inverse relation between relative wages and immigration-induced supply shifts, it has been difficult to document such effects. The weak evidence may be partly due to sampling error in a commonly used measure of the supply shift, the immigrant share of the...

Although a sizable fraction of the Puerto Rican-born population moved to the United States, the island also received large inflows of persons born outside Puerto Rico. Hence Puerto Rico provides a unique setting for examining how labor inflows and outflows coexist, and measuring the mirror-image...

The theory of factor demand has important implications for the study of the impact of immigration on wages. This paper derives the theoretical implications in the context of a general equilibrium model where the wage impact depends on the elasticity of product demand, the rate at which the...