Immigration, Education, and Wages in the U.S.

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD

Investigators

Abstract

Since the 1970s American workers have faced rising wage inequality and increasing wage polarization, featuring stagnation at the lower tail and growth at the upper tail. In particular, college-educated workers have experienced a large variation in returns to the same level of formal education and work experience. The 1990 Immigration Act aimed to bring in skilled immigrants in some specialty fields to fill the identified labor shortage. This policy shift, coupled with Information and Communication Technology revolution, led to a growing foreign-born share of skilled labor and an overrepresentation of the foreign born in selected fields of study. Despite growing research interest very little is known about the impact of immigration and specialized human capital on rising wage inequality. This study focuses on the whole college-educated population, in an effort to assess simultaneously the impact of technology and immigration on the wage distribution of the college-educated population, drawing data from the 1993 and 2003 National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG). The study's intellectual merit comes through its substantive and methodological contributions. First, it develops a theory-based classification scheme for specialized human capital, defined as field of study, to conceptualize the skills among the college-educated. Second, the research apitalizes on the two large cross-sections of national data on all college-educated labor force to perform inter-cohort analysis between new skilled workers in the 1980s and those in the 1990s to identify the effect of ICT innovation vs. diffusion and skilled immigration policy shift. Third, the study examines the cohort evolution of workers who entered the skilled labor before 1980 to examine how ICT and immigration policy differentiate wage growth of different skill groups. Finally, the investigators quantify how technological and policy changes influence the wage inequality and polarization of the college population using the model-based method of quantile regression and quantile regression decomposition. Broader Impacts. The knowledge generated in this study will make substantial contribution to the literature on immigration, science and technology workforce and social inequality. Findings will bridge research and teaching by effectively impacting curriculum change in both substantive sociology courses and methodology courses. This project will train and mentor graduate and undergraduate students. Two doctoral students are expected to join the research team, in their training to achieve primary concentrations in immigration and inequality. More generally, findings on the specialized human capital will enhance our understanding oft which skill sets are rewarded in the increasingly technology-driven and globalized society