Heaven's Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy by Borjas George J

Author:Borjas, George J. [Borjas, George J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2011-11-11T05:00:00+00:00

Figure 7-3 clearly shows that the children of immigrant groups that had high literacy rates would eventually attain more education, and that the children of high-wage immigrant groups would eventually have higher wages. In fact, the trend line linking literacy rates and educational attainment across generations indicates that a 20 percentage point difference in literacy rates between two immigrant groups in 1910 is associated with a difference of about one year of schooling for their children.20 Because differences in literacy rates of 20 percentage points among the first-generation ethnic groups were common, the intergenerational link in skills generated substantial differences in educational attainment among the groups in the second generation. Similarly, the trend line linking wages across generations indicates that about 60 percent of the earnings gap between any two immigrant groups persisted into the second generation.

The historical record shows that the skill differentials across ethnic groups introduced by the First Great Migration did not disappear within one generation. It is also remarkable that the intergenerational correlation between the average skills of immigrants and their children was roughly constant through the entire twentieth century.21 At least half of the wage gap between any two ethnic groups in the first generation persisted into the second, regardless of whether the immigrants arrived in the early 1900s, prior to 1940, or in the 1960s. This historical experience suggests that half of the sizable skill differentials that exist among the immigrant groups in the Second Great Migration will likely persist into the second generation.

The Grandchildren of the First Great Migration

To determine if the ethnic skill differentials introduced by the First Great Migration continued beyond the second generation, one can move forward in time to about 1985 and assess how third-generation workers performed in the U.S. labor market at that time. The sample of grandchildren from the First Great Migration is drawn from the General Social Surveys.22 The sample includes persons who are U.S.-born and have U.S.-born parents, but have at least one foreign-born grandparent. All respondents in this survey were asked to report their ancestry. One can then use the self-reported ethnic background to classify the worker into one of the ethnic groups that made up the First Great Migration.23

There clearly exist some skill differences among third-generation ethnic groups—although these differences are far smaller than the ones observed in the first and second generations (see Figure 7-4). Even after three-quarters of a century, however, one can still see a positive correlation between the average skills of the original immigrant groups and the average skills of the corresponding third-generation ethnic groups. The trend line linking educational attainment across generations indicates that a 20 percentage point differential in literacy rates among immigrant groups in 1910 is associated with about a half-year difference in educational attainment among the third-generation ethnic groups in 1985.24 Recall that a 20 percentage point difference in literacy rates in 1910 implied a one-year difference in the educational attainment among second-generation groups. In effect, the regression toward the mean that occurs between the

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