Do Foreign Students Crowd Out Native Students from Graduate Programs?

This paper examines how the growth in the number of foreign students enrolled in graduate programs affects native enrollment in those programs. Although there is little evidence of a crowdout effect for the typical native student, the impact of foreign students on native educational outcomes differs dramatically across ethnic groups, and is particularly adverse for white native men. There is a strong negative correlation between increases in the number of foreign students enrolled at a particular university and the number of white native men in that university's graduate program. This crowdout effect is strongest at the most elite institutions.

The Economic Benefits from Immigration

Natives benefit from immigration mainly because of production complementarities between immigrant workers and other factors of production, and these benefits are larger when immigrants are sufficiently `different' from the stock of native productive inputs. The available evidence suggests that the economic benefits from immigration for the United States are small, on the order of $6 billion and almost certainly less than$20 billion annually. These gains, however, could be increased considerably if the United States pursued an immigration policy which attracted a more skilled immigrant flow.

The Labor Market Impact of High-Skill Immigration

The rapid growth in the number of foreign students enrolled in American universities has transformed the higher education system, particularly at the graduate level. Many of these newly minted doctorates remain in the United States after receiving their doctoral degrees, so that the foreign student influx can have a significant impact in the labor market for high-skill workers. Using data drawn from the Survey of Earned Doctorates and the Survey of Doctoral Recipients, the study shows that a foreign student influx into a particular doctoral field at a particular time had a significant and adverse effect on the earnings of doctorates in that field who graduated at roughly the same time. A 10 percent immigration-induced increase in the supply of doctorates lowers the wage of competing workers by about 3 percent.

Welfare Reform, Labor Supply, and Health Insurance in the Immigrant Population

Although the 1996 welfare reform legislation limited the eligibility of immigrant households to receive assistance, many states chose to protect their immigrant populations by offering state-funded aid to these groups. I exploit these changes in eligibility rules to examine the link between the welfare cutbacks and health insurance coverage in the immigrant population. The data reveal that the cutbacks in the Medicaid program did not reduce health insurance coverage rates among targeted immigrants. The immigrants responded by increasing their labor supply, thereby raising the probability of being covered by employer-sponsored health insurance.

Making it in America: Social Mobility in the Immigrant Population

The ultimate impact of immigration on the United States obviously depends not only on the economic, social, political, and cultural shifts that take place during the life cycle of the immigrant population, but also on the adjustment process experienced by the immigrant household across generations. This paper documents the evidence on social mobility in the immigrant population and summarizes some of the lessons implied by the evidence. There is significant economic "catching up" between the first and second generations, with the relative wage of the second generation being, on average, about 5 to 10 percent higher than that of the first generation. At the same time, there is a strong positive correlation between the socioeconomic outcomes experienced by ethnic groups in the immigrant generation and the outcomes experienced by their children, and a weaker correlation between the immigrants and their grandchildren. In rough terms, about half of the differences in relative economic status across ethnic groups observed in one generation persist into the next. As a result, the very large ethnic differences in economic status that characterize the current immigrant population will likely dominate discussions of American social policy for much of the 21st century.

The internationalization of the U.S. labor market and the wage structure

The increasing internationalization of the U.S. labor market has had important effects on the wage structure. Immigration has probably increased wage inequality because recent immigrant waves tend to be less skilled than earlier waves. Growing trade deficits in durable goods have also increased wage inequality by reducing the relatively high wages of less-skilled workers in these industries and by displacing workers from them.Emigration and immigration ; International trade ; Labor market ; Wages

Native Internal Migration and the Labor Market Impact of Immigration

This paper presents a theoretical and empirical study of how immigration influences the joint determination of the wage structure and internal migration behavior for native-born workers in local labor markets. Using data from the 1960-2000 decennial censuses, the study shows that immigration is associated with lower in-migration rates, higher out-migration rates, and a decline in the growth rate of the native workforce. The native migration response attenuates the measured impact of immigration on wages in a local labor market by 40 to 60 percent, depending on whether the labor market is defined at the state or metropolitan area level.

The Sensitivity of Labor Demand Functions to Choice of Dependent Variable

This paper investigates whether the parameters of labor demand functions are sensitive to alternative methods of estimation. The assumption that the production technology is of the Generalized Leontief type implies that the demand system can be estimated by analyzing cross-section differences in earnings across labor markets, by studying longitudinal changes in earnings within a labor market, or by investigating cross-section differences in labor force participation rates across labor markets. The estimation of these models on the 1970 and 1980 Public Use Samples from the U.S. Census reveals that the estimates of labor demand functions are indeed quite robust to major specification changes.