Using data from 1980, 1990, and 2000 U.S. censuses, as well as the 2010 and 2019 American Community Surveys and the 1993-2019 National Survey of College Graduates, we investigate the performance of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. labor market over the past 40 years since China initiated its...

The initial earnings of U.S. immigrants vary enormously by country of origin. Via three interrelated analyses, we show earnings convergence across source countries with time in the United States. Human-capital theory plausibly explains the inverse relationship between initial earnings and...

This paper uses data from the 1980 and 1990 U.S. Censuses to analyze the labor market experience of high-skilled immigrants relative to high-skilled natives. Immigrants are found to be more likely to be working in one of the high-skilled occupations than natives, but the gap between the two...