Search

"The objective of this paper is to describe and understand the determinants of changes in the number and quality of new legal immigrants to the United States over the last 25 years. Our main interest is in understanding the behavioral response of potential immigrants to changes in the U.S. immigration law regime (as well as in the origin-country determinants of demand for immigration to the United States) and how these affect and have affected the skill composition of immigrants.... [The authors] assembled a new data set based on annual INS records of all new, legal immigrants over the period 1972 through 1995.... Inspection of our new data indicates that since the mid 1980s the average skill of new, U.S. legal immigrants has been rising relative to that of the U.S. population. An econometric analysis of a panel of country-specific measures of the skill of immigrants based on these data over the period 1972-1992 indicates that these changes are due in part to changes in immigration law and to the overall rise in the real purchasing power of countries outside the United States.", (excerpt)

"This article reviews the evidence pertaining to the extent to which U.S. immigrants actually make use of the family reunification entitlements of United States immigration laws, examining the two available studies which are based on probability samples of immigrant entry cohorts. It then provides new estimates of the characteristics of the U.S. citizen sponsors of immigrant spouses and parents.... With respect to the characteristics of sponsors, analysis of the information in the GAO [General Accounting Office] report indicates that 80 percent of the persons who immigrated in FY 1985 as the spouses of U.S. citizens were sponsored by native born U.S. citizens. In contrast, native born U.S. citizens sponsored only five percent of the parent immigrants. Additional findings on the country of origin and sex of the sponsored immigrants are presented.", (excerpt)

"In this paper we focus on the migration-related processes that may lead to the well-documented differences in earnings and in naturalization rates across country-of-origin groups in the United States. Our theoretical framework examines how the forces of selectivity associated with the decisions by residents of non-U.S. countries to migrate to the United States and with the decisions by foreign-born U.S. residents to remain in the United States are influenced by country conditions and are reflected ultimately in the observed earnings differences among the 'survivors' of these processes who are enumerated in U.S. sample surveys. In particular, we assess how economic conditions, origin-country attractiveness, costs of migration, the quantity and quality of information, and the country-specific restrictions of U.S. immigration law influence both who migrates to and, among the migrants, who remains in the United States. The framework is applied to two U.S. data sets--a sample of the foreign born in the 1980 Census and a sample from the 1971 cohort of legal immigrants.", (excerpt)