Immigrants' Employment Stability Over the Great Recession and Its Aftermath

Abstract

We examine immigrant men's employment stability during the Great Recession and its aftermath using a longitudinal approach that draws on data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), a nationally representative panel survey of U.S. residents. Discrete-time event-history models are used to estimate male immigrants' relative risk of experiencing an involuntary job loss or underemployment, defined as working less than full-time involuntarily. The analysis also investigates differences in job stability by immigrant documentation status. Undocumented immigrants are identified using a logical allocation method augmented with external information about whether the respondent was successfully matched with administrative data. We find that immigrants are at significantly higher risk of involuntary job loss, and especially of underemployment relative to native-born workers. Undocumented immigrants face a greater risk of adverse job transitions, particularly underemployment in the first part of the recession. When demographic and job characteristics are taken into account, immigrant-native and documented-undocumented differences attenuate but remain in many instances. A comparison of our findings with those from an earlier nonrecessionary period from 2004 to 2006 suggests that immigrants' higher risk of employment instability may be attributed to the recession.

Worker Voices Special Brief: Self-Employment, Dreams Versus Reality

“…They cited a lack of alternatives in the labor market, either because of job instability or their immigration status. Research shows that many immigrants work in riskier jobs with a higher degree of injury (Orrenius and Zavodny 2009), and immigrants and undocumented workers have a higher risk of job loss and adverse job transitions (Tamborini and Villarreal 2021).…”

Point estimation of certain measures in organizational demography using variable-r methods

“…In principle, a panel dataset tracking a sufficiently large random sample of individual workers' hiring and exit dates from employers and the reason for separation would be sufficient to estimate the actual distribution of job tenures over time and all related quantities of interest discussed in this article. In the US context, publicly available panels of employee tenures suffer from shortcomings in either survey design or sample size (Gottschalk and Moffitt 1999: S91-S94;Tamborini and Villarreal 2021;Baum 2022;Molloy, Smith, and Wozniak, forthcoming). The NLSY includes fewer than 25,000 total participants drawn from a dozen birth year cohorts in the 20 th century.…”

Unequal effects of the COVID-19 epidemic on employment: Differences by immigrant status and race/ethnicity

“…Foreign-born workers are often the “first fired” during economic downturns but also the “first hired” when the economy recovers [ 10 , 12 ]. During the Great Recession, foreign-born workers experienced a greater incidence of job loss [ 11 , 38 ] and underemployment [ 36 ], particularly during the initial months.…”

“…Comparatively less is known about how the COVID-19 epidemic affected immigrant workers. Immigrant men are often employed in more precarious conditions and are therefore the first to be laid off during economic downturns [10][11][12]. Evidence indeed suggests that immigrant men and women had lower employment rates than their native-born counterparts in the early part of the epidemic [13].…”