Promoting entry of high-quality workers through US immigration policy

ABSTRACT

We examine how US immigrants would be affected by applying a simple point system for admission, as Canada does. Since US immigration policy emphasizes family reunification, immigrants have lower education and earnings than natives, with unauthorized immigrants’ education below legal ones. Using American Community Survey data, and Center for Migration Studies data, which allows us to distinguish legal from unauthorized immigrants, we examine the effects of requiring immigrants to meet 2 of 3 conditions: (1) a high school or college degree, (2) being less than 40 years old and (3) working in a professional occupation, while admitting the same numbers of immigrants. This policy changes the source countries of immigrants and there are large positive effects on immigrant earnings. Immigrants’ use of government transfer programs is reduced to below natives and income inequality falls. Finally, with existing policy, immigrant earnings growth is not enough to overtake natives given immigrants’ entering earnings disadvantage. With this point system, immigrants start at a higher level and surpass natives relatively quickly.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration
• unauthorized immigrants
• point system
• transfers
• assimilation

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• J61
• I30
• J15
• J31

Acknowledgements

We wish to acknowledge the help of the Center for Migration Studies, which allowed us to use their data on unauthorized immigrants. This enabled us to distinguish the effects of policies on legal versus unauthorized immigrants, and tremendously improved this article. This work was supported by Central Michigan University under a grant entitled ‘Promoting Entry of High-Quality Workers through US Immigration Policy’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Central Michigan University under a grant entitled ‘Promoting Entry of High-Quality Workers through US Immigration Policy’.