Previous studies show that immigrants to the United States married to natives earn higher wages than immigrants married to other immigrants. Using data from the 1980 to 2000 U.S. censuses and the 2005 to 2010 American Community Surveys, we show that these wage premiums have increased over time. Our evidence suggests that the trends are unlikely to be explained by changes in the attributes of immigrants who tend to marry natives but might instead be a result of changes in how these attributes are rewarded in the labor market. Because immigrants married to natives tend to have more schooling, part of the increasing premium can be explained by increases in the value of a college education. We find, however, that even when allowing the value of education and English-speaking ability to vary, intermarriage wage premiums have increased over time. We believe these patterns might be driven by changes in technology and globalization, which have made communication and management skills more highly rewarded in the U.S. labor market.
Using data from the 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 Censuses and the American Community Survey five‐year sample for 2006–2010, we examine the impacts of immigration inflows on the migration patterns of co‐ethnic natives in the United States. We explore whether the outcomes are driven by changes in labor market returns in the receiving cities or sociocultural benefits of being surrounded by co‐ethnics. We find that a higher ethnicity‐specific immigrant population share within a city increases the population share of both co‐ethnic natives who remain in the receiving cities and co‐ethnic natives who migrate into these cities, relative to natives of other ancestries. All baseline results survive robustness and falsification tests, and instrumental variable estimations. Through the heterogeneous effects, we find that the sociocultural benefits, such as language and ethnic goods that immigrants bring to receiving cities, are the potential channels that attract co‐ethnic natives to migrate towards those enclaves.
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