Immigrant Selectivity, Ethnic Enclaves and the Labour Market Outcomes of Latinos in the USA

Kate Choi, University of Western Ontario
Renee Luthra , University of Essex

It is broadly assumed that migrants are selected on educational attainment – that is, that their attainment differs in systematic ways from the general population in their sending country. Researchers often attribute the variation in immigrants’ labour market outcomes that remain unexplained after the inclusion of standard demographic and socioeconomic controls to this migrant selectivity effect. In this paper, we test for a selectivity effect in the labour market outcomes of Latino immigrants to the United States. We combine data from the 2007-2021 American Community Survey (ACS) with internationally standardised data on educational distributions around the world to answer three research questions. First, what is the actual degree of educational selection of immigrants from Latin America who arrived in the United States as adults from 1960 to 2021? Second, do those who are more positively selected have better labour market outcomes above and beyond standard socioeconomic and demographic controls? Third, does the association between educational selection and labour market outcomes vary in areas with high (or low) concentrations of Latino immigrants? We find that even after a wide range of controls, including absolute levels of education, more positively selected Latino immigrants are more likely to have standard employment relationships, higher wages, and to work in more skilled occupations. This positive association is moderated by residence in ethnic enclaves in complex ways, differing across labour market outcomes and by gender.

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 Presented in Session 19. The Labor-Market Outcomes of Migrant Populations