Gendered Pathways: Employment Behavior among Family-Based and Skill-Based Immigrants in the United States

Abstract

The United States is the only country to admit the majority of its immigrants on the basis of kinship ties. Although policy makers typically view family migration as less favorable and assume that family immigrants do not contribute to the U.S. economy, this argument is oversimplified and ignores the role of gender and the various ways that family immigration works. This study captures the multiple aspects of immigrants’ entry visas and its intersection with gender to examine the employment behavior of college-educated immigrant men and women who arrived in the United States via several family-based and skill-based categories. Using nationally representative data from 2010, 2013, and 2015 National Survey of College Graduates, the author finds that immigrants’ initial entry pathways into the United States continue to stratify their employment behavior and trajectories, especially for immigrant women. The conditions of family-sponsored immigration matter; temporary migration as a spouse is negatively associated with immigrant women’s employment but not permanent family migration.