Immigrant employment through the Great Recession: Individual characteristics and metropolitan contexts

Abstract

Immigrants continue to settle in metropolitan areas across the United States and bring significant changes to various urban labor markets. Using American Community Survey (ACS) data for 2007 and 2011, we trace the employment outcomes of immigrants compared to native-born workers before and after the recent Great Recession across the 100 largest metropolitan areas and examine individual-level and metropolitan-level factors that shape their employment outcomes. We find that low-skilled workers in general and immigrants without English proficiency and those who are new entrants or earliest arrivals are harder hit in the recession. Latino immigrants and black workers fare worse in areas with high immigrant concentration. Latino immigrants experience employment gains, however, in the South, large urban economies, as well as new immigrant gateways. Asian immigrants see declines in employment likelihood in areas with a large construction sector, while areas with a large trade sector hurt native-born white workers.

Keywords:

• Immigration
• Employment
• Recession
• Metropolitan Areas

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research Early Career Research Grant for funding this research.

Notes

1 In calculating predicted probabilities of employment using Stata's prvalue command we set the MSA-level variables equal to the means across all racial/ethnic groups and two study years, including: % new immigrants 2007 (15.98), % new immigrants in 2007 (40.47), total employment in 2007 in thousands (2,269.84), average annual pay in 2005 in thousands of dollars (43.81), % employment growth 2005 to 2007 (5.26), unemployment rate in 2005 (4.99), % manufacturing industry in 2007 (10.13), % construction industry in 2007 (7.66), and % trade industry in 2007 (14.59).