Skilled Immigrants Research Articles

Skilled immigration, offshoring, and trade

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model with skilled immigration, offshore labor hiring, and intermediate input trade to study the impact of skilled immigration policy changes in the US. Consistent with the data, the model accounts for a small subset of large firms that adjust offshore labor hiring in response to skilled immigration policy changes. Our calibrated model that matches the US economy shows that if we ignore the offshoring channel, we would overstate welfare gains to skilled domestic wage earners by approximately 20 percent following a 10 percent immigration cap reduction. The paper highlights the importance of considering the interactions between immigration, offshoring, and trade when studying the impacts of skilled immigration policy on domestic labor markets and trade.

Detecting Imperfect Substitution between Comparably Skilled Immigrants and Natives: A Machine Learning Approach

Immigration economists often disagree about whether comparably skilled immigrants and natives are perfect substitutes in the United States and other developed countries, leading these scholars to different assessments of the labor market impacts of immigration and policy recommendations. This article attempts to provide theoretical bases for understanding the immigrant-native substitution and to introduce machine learning techniques to resolve the empirical debate. Using the male subsample from the US Census and American Community Survey, it shows that the difference in covariate selection explains substantial disagreements in estimating immigrant-native substitution. Given the difficulties in providing compelling theoretical justifications for covariates selected, this article proposes estimating via the Lasso-type (least absolute shrinkage and selection operator) estimators. My Lasso-based estimation rejects perfect substitution, but it also implies easier substitution than that preferred by Ottaviano and Peri, suggesting more direct immigrant-native competition. By extending the sample to women, I find similar immigrant-native substitution across gender. Therefore, this article casts doubt on previous immigration impact assessments. Indeed, my simulation suggests considerable precision gains concerning the immigration's wage impacts on immigrants themselves. Furthermore, this article identifies immigrant segregation as a critical source of the national-level imperfect substitution, which decreases within progressively smaller regions and almost disappears in the same city. By introducing the Lasso-type estimators into migration studies, this article makes solid progress toward evaluating and understanding imperfect immigrant-native substitution and its socioeconomic consequences.

All Are Not Equal: Taiwanese Public Opinion on Southeast Asian Immigration

Abstract What influences Taiwanese public opinion on immigration? Taiwan faces the same immigration challenges as many other developed nations, where the demand for immigrant workers produces a domestic backlash. Our study addresses to what extent public opinions on immigration are influenced by two factors: the skills of immigrants and their place of origin. Our results show, besides the preference for skilled labour, that public opinion on the three Southeast Asian immigrant groups varies considerably, with the strongest negative reaction to Indonesian migrants. As Taiwan prides its progress on human rights among East Asian democracies, the results suggest the need for targeted policy efforts to overcome public biases towards Southeast Asian immigrants.

Linguistic Enclaves, Sorting, and Language Skills of Immigrants

The literature argues that linguistic enclaves negatively affect immigrants’ language proficiency by reducing their exposure and incentives to learn destination language. This negative association may, however, be spurious, arising due to the self-selection of immigrants into regions with larger enclaves. Exploiting the natural experiment of the German residential policy, this paper analyses the influence of linguistic enclaves on refugees’ language proficiency. We find no evidence that enclaves hamper German language learning among refugees. Our results are robust to various measurements and model specifications. We conclude that the negative relationship reported in previous research is mainly driven by immigrant’s residential sorting.

Antecedents of skilled international immigrants to Vietnam: The importance of global network and institutional quality

This paper examines the demographic, economic, and social antecedents of international migrations of skilled laborers to Vietnam. We defined skilled immigrants as individuals who are working in professional positions, such as managers, CEO, specialist, and technical laborers. Using various econometric techniques for the sample of 63 provinces in Vietnam during the 2019–2020 period, our study highlights the importance of global network and institutional quality in promoting the international inflows of skilled workers to each province in Vietnam. The income of the host city and the lack of skilled labors in these cities captured by the level of young employment and skilled worker also play a critical role in skilled immigrants’ decisions.

BANGLADESHI IMMIGRANTS’ EXPERIENCE AND PERCEPTIONS ABOUT THEIR OCCUPATIONS IN CANADA

This study examines Bangladeshi immigrants’ experience and perceptions about their occupations in Canada using both primary and secondary data. Primary data were collected using face-to-face in-depth interview and thematic concepts were used to analyze the data. In general, the study finds that majority skilled immigrants are more likely to be employed in non-professional jobs with lower occupational prestige. However, those who obtain their education both in Bangladesh and Canada have higher probability of getting professional jobs in the Canadian labour market as compared to those who obtain their education only in Bangladesh. In addition, Bangladeshi immigrants’ social network plays a pivotal role in getting jobs in the Canadian labour market. Policy implications for Bangladesh are discussed as well.

Skilled immigration, firms, and policy

We develop a two-sector dynamic general equilibrium model with skilled immigration that focuses on the role of firms. The model is consistent with data on firm demand for foreign labor and firm size in the United States. Monopolistically competitive firms in the skill-intensive sector differ in productivity and a subset of relatively larger firms hire foreign workers subject to skilled immigration policies that are similar to the United States: Firms face hiring costs and there is an immigration cap that binds if the aggregate demand for foreign workers exceeds a quota. A binding immigration cap reduces firms’ demand for foreign skilled workers and, quantitatively, accounts for 16.82% of the hiring distortion in the decentralized equilibrium when compared to the first-best allocation. We evaluate the effects of different immigration cap changes and quantify the welfare implications for domestic households.

Retention of skilled immigrants: Off-job-embeddedness on global workers’ Likelihood to Remain in DK

The globalization of labor markets has provided specialists opportunities to work around the world but little is still known about why they chose to leave, or stay in, a host country. This paper focuses on how two off-the-job embeddedness factors affect international retention. Contrary to existing research, we suggest that embeddedness off-the-job creates both pull-factors based on a sense of belonging, and push-factors, as it enables information, flows, and social comparison. We present a study based on population data covering all skilled immigrants in the Danish labor market across 9 years. Results indicate that embeddedness in professional multi-ethnical communities increases the likelihood of staying, while community embeddedness based on professional similarity is related to a higher likelihood to leave Denmark. The analysis also reveals that having a spouse limits skilled immigrants' likelihood to leave. In the study, we importantly find that children have a strong lock-in mechanism for skilled immigrants, and the effect is particularly strong for immigrants whose spouse is not from the host country. The study contributes new insights into the consequences of embeddedness as well as practical knowledge on the dynamics underlying the global mobility of highly skilled workers.

Does Employing Skilled Immigrants Enhance Competitive Performance? Evidence from Football Clubs

We investigate the effect of hiring skilled immigrant employees on the competitive performance of organizations. This relationship that has been difficult to establish in prior work due to theoretical ambiguity, limited data, and inherent endogeneity. We overcome these difficulties by studying European football (soccer) clubs in Germany, France, England, and Spain during 1990-2020. Detailed microdata from this setting offers unusual transparency on the migration and hiring of talent and their contribution to collective performance. Further, the industry is characterized by country-level changes in rules that govern the number of immigrant players clubs can hire and deploy. Using these rule changes as the basis for instrumental variables, we find a positive local average treatment effect of the number of immigrant players fielded by a club on the club’s in-game performance. To examine the theoretical mechanisms, we explore whether immigrants cause superior performance because they are more talented than natives or because they enhance the national diversity of their clubs. We find strong evidence for the talent mechanism. We find contingent evidence for the national diversity mechanism: national diversity has a positive relationship with club performance only when the club employs an immigrant manager (coach). The presence of an immigrant manager also strengthens the positive relationship between the number of immigrant players and club performance.

Exploring the Experiences of Highly Skilled Immigrants in Career and Technical Education

ABSTRACT Immigrants are more likely to arrive in the United States with lower levels of education, resulting in lower-status jobs, leading to lower incomes and less accumulation of wealth. However, a segment of the immigrant population enters the United States with the expectation of contributing immediately and directly to the country’s economic advancement: the highly skilled immigrant. Unfortunately, many cannot gain recognition for their foreign academic or occupational credentials while in the United States. For many, career and technical education, or vocational programs, have been helpful. Utilizing the acculturation framework, this study explores the experiences of ten highly skilled immigrants with credentials from their home countries who could not gain recognition for their credentials in the United States. This study further examines the motivations that led them to enroll in career and technical education programs in the United States. The findings from this study presented the themes of (1) Inability to continue in the previous career, (2) High cost of graduate degrees in the United States, (3) Difficulties in transferring foreign credentials, (4) Immediate employment opportunities after career and technical education program completion and (5) Age/Adult learner.

The supply of foreign talent: how skill-biased technology drives the location choice and skills of new immigrants

An important goal of immigration policy is facilitating the entry of foreign-born workers whose skills are in short supply in destination labor markets. In recent decades, information and communication technology (ICT) has fueled the demand for highly educated workers at the expense of less-educated groups. Exploiting the fact that regions in Switzerland have been differentially exposed to ICT due to their pre-ICT industrial composition, we present evidence suggesting that more exposed regions experienced stronger ICT adoption, accompanied by considerably stronger growth in relative employment and wage premia for college-educated workers. Following this change in the landscape of relative economic opportunities, we find robust evidence that these regions experienced a much larger influx of highly educated immigrants in absolute terms as well as relative to lower educated groups. Our results suggest that immigrants’ location decisions respond strongly to these long-run, technology-driven changes in their economic opportunities.

Linguistic outcomes of language accountability and points-based system for multilingual skilled immigrants in Canada: a critical language-in-immigration policy analysis

ABSTRACT Despite recognising multilingualism as a reality and multilingual workforce as an advantage, language policies continue to favour certain languages over others. Using a case study of Canada’s language-in-immigration policy related to three federally administered immigration programs, this study is an attempt to understand how the macro-level policy represents Canada’s official languages (English and French) vis-à-vis the linguistic diversity that skilled immigrants bring to the country. A particular emphasis is given to the role of the Canadian points-based system and how it has emerged as a device to create power relations between the official languages and other languages. The findings reveal a disconnect between the macro policies and the social realities where a linguistic imbalance and inclusion of accountability measures have created a narrow model of social integration that expects multilingual skilled workers to integrate into the socio-economic culture through one of the official languages of Canada. Disregarding the multilingual reality of the Canadian society and not utilising the linguistic diversity of the multilingual workforce is a missed opportunity to benefit fully from these skilled workers and requires rethinking the current model of integration from a multilingual perspective.

Immigrant Skill Selection: A Case Study of South Africa and the USA

Immigrant Skill Selection: A Case Study of South Africa and the USA

Highly Skilled International Migration, STEM Workers, and Innovation

Abstract This article studies the implications of highly skilled labor international migration in a two-country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. The model considers three types of workers: Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics (STEM) workers, non-STEM college educated workers, and non-college educated workers. Aggregate productivity in each economy is a function of innovations, which can be produced only by STEM workers. The model predicts (i) the existence of a wage premium of STEM workers relative to non-STEM college educated workers, (ii) the skill wage premium is higher in the destination country and increases with positive technological shocks, (iii) a reduction in migration costs increases output, wages, and total labor in the destination country, with opposite effects in the country of origin, and (iv) high skilled immigrants reduce skilled native labor and do not affect unskilled labor. Finally, a migration policy designed to attract STEM workers generates similar effects to a positive aggregate productivity shock.

The Persistence of Human Capital over Time: Evidence from a Positive Immigration Shock

In this paper, I study the long-run effects of a positive shock to the labor force in Sao Paulo. Using a dataset based on Brazil and an estimation strategy based on regression analysis, I show both a positive direct and indirect effect of settlement on human capital. Being a recipient of highly skilled immigrants in 1872 is found to be positively associated with a rise in literacy rates, as well as higher per capita income and access to running water.

Do natives prefer white immigrants? Evidence from Japan

ABSTRACT Does public support for immigration depend on race? One set of literature argues that natives focus on reaping economic benefits and prefer to admit high skilled immigrants. Yet, a second group of studies challenges the notion that natives evaluate skills in a race-neutral fashion. Recent qualitative work argues that natives socially construct the value of foreign workers’ skills. Furthermore, recent experimental studies find that Americans and Europeans prefer immigrants from developed White-majority countries. Do these findings reflect a general preference for White immigrants which also shapes immigration attitudes in non-western countries? Our study explores this question using a survey experiment fielded in Japan at a time when that country was grappling with economic pressures to admit more immigrants. Consistent with the social construction of skills literature, we find that Japanese unevenly apply skill requirements to prospective immigrants based on nationality but that they do not necessarily prefer White immigrants.

The Impact of International Migration on Skills Supply and Demand in South Africa

This study investigated the demographic, education and labour market characteristics of three groups: (1) immigrants into South Africa; (2) natives who remained in the country; (3) emigrants into the top five destination countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and USA). The empirical findings were used to examine the extent of migration to and from the country, from the perspectives of skills supply and demand. Emigrants were most educated, enjoyed the lowest unemployment probability (about 10%), and were most likely to be involved in high-paying skilled occupations and tertiary sector activities as full-time employees (if employed). The immigrants fared worse than the emigrants but better than natives. These immigrants, mainly originating from the other African countries, were slightly more educated, but enjoyed higher LFPR (75%) and lower unemployment likelihood (20%), compared with the natives (55% and 30% respectively). Furthermore, for both above-mentioned two groups, they were distinguished into long-term, medium-term and short-term migrants, and it was found that long-term migrants fared relatively better in the labour markets of their respective host countries. Overall, the findings strongly indicated brain drain out of South Africa, and exodus of highly educated and skilled people is not complemented by a rapid increase of supply of equally educated and skilled labour force entrants in the country. The study recommended four policy suggestions: ease up regulations to attract skilled immigrants, promote entrepreneurial activities of immigrants, better develop and retain skills of the natives, improve migration and vacancy data capture, availability, usage and analysis.

The Impact of High Skilled Immigration on Regional Entrepreneurship

The Impact of High Skilled Immigration on Regional Entrepreneurship

Миграции из Южной Азии в Западную Европу: истоки, тенденции, перспективы

The article is concentrated on the phenomenon of Indian and South Asian migration to the countries of Western Europe. Initially, migration flows from this region were an inalienable part of metropolis–colonies interrelationship and were sustained on the notion of free and unrestricted movement of human resources from South Asia to the British Isles. After the dissolution of the British Empire and gaining independence, the inhabitants of India and South Asia, in search for a “happier life” overseas, set their course for the United Kingdom and Western Europe, where later migrants were put under rigorous political control. However, the flows of those seeking economic prosperity and political asylum remained intensive and became subject to methodical social regulations in Western Europe. Equilibrium of this kind was put to a severe test when the migration crisis of 2015 and 2016 broke out. Only the most advanced groups of migrants could adjust themselves to the newly emerged reality as demonstrated by the cases of the Netherlands and Italy. The Dutch government has restricted the inflow of low-skilled labour, while encouraging skilled immigration. Indian labour force is generally employed in IT, consultancy, engineering or management. Local and national governments work together with private partners to make the lives of these newcomers easier. High-skilled migrants are welcome as new citizens. Most Indians in Italy have settled in the north of the country and work in agriculture. Indians are considered industrious, business-minded, hard-working and law-abiding. The Indian migrant community has integrated successfully into Italian economic and social life. The author argues that the Dutch and Italian practice of handling the Indian migrants could be critically absorbed in Russia that is keen to attract the “demographic dividend” from outside.

Skilled immigrants job search: the role of self-efficacy, future orientation, and work involvement

Skilled immigrants job search: the role of self-efficacy, future orientation, and work involvement