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...

Beginning with the important work of Murphyand Welch (1992), a great deal of recentresearch has attempted to document andexplain the dramatic changes in the wage distributionthat occurred during the 1980s (see also Katz andMurphy 1992). Practically every income group faced adecline in real wages...