Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/315054 
Year of Publication: 
2025
Series/Report no.: 
GLO Discussion Paper No. 1596
Publisher: 
Global Labor Organization (GLO), Essen
Abstract: 
The 1924 Immigration Act excluded immigrants from economically developing countries to the point of their near total exclusion. Forty years later, the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act eliminated most discriminatory county-of-origin barriers. America's doors opened and immigration from economically developing countries soared. Fueling debates about the "quality" of immigrants from economically developing countries, empirical studies based on a wellrespected methodology conclude that post-1965 immigrant men have low initial earnings and sluggish earnings growth. This methodology is based on flawed assumptions (Duleep, Liu, and Regets, 2022). Removing these assumptions reveals high earnings growth for post-1965 immigrant men in accordance with the Immigrant Human Capital Investment Model (Duleep and Regets, 1999). A similar story emerges for immigrant women, contradicting the Family Investment Hypothesis first put forth by Long (1980) and Duleep and Sanders (1993). It appears a pre- 1965/post-1965 transition occurred in the earnings profiles of U.S. immigrants, from earnings resembling those of U.S. natives to low initial earnings but much higher earnings growth than their U.S.-born statistical twins. The transition underlies the overtime success story of immigrant families from economically developing countries (Duleep, Regets, Sanders, and Wunnava, 2021); the high earnings growth reflects human capital investment that invigorates the economy (Duleep, Jaeger, and McHenry, 2018; Green, 1999, Green and Worswick, 2012).
Subjects: 
Immigrant earning growth
human capital investment
skill transferability
immigrant quality
sample restrictions
family investment hypothesis
nonparametric estimation
JEL: 
J15
J16
J24
J31
C1
Additional Information: 
Forthcoming in Research in Labor Economics
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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