Grandchildren of Low-Skill Immigrants Have Lagging Education and Earnings
By Jason Richwine on November 13, 2018
Summary
The intergenerational assimilation of low-skill immigrants is an important issue in the broader immigration debate. If the children and grandchildren of low-skill immigrants eventually rise to the same socioeconomic level as natives, then the poverty-related problems caused by low-skill immigration, though painful today, will dissipate over time.
Past research on the assimilation of Americans who have ancestors from Mexico (the largest source of low-skill immigration to the United States) indicates that Mexican-Americans continue to lag behind in the third generation and beyond. However, reliance on survey respondents self-identifying as Mexican-American has made this research less than definitive, as not everyone with Mexican-born grandparents has retained a Mexican-American identity.
To solve this "ethnic attrition" problem, researchers have turned to the 1997 panel of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY-97). Unique among government data sets, the NLSY-97 includes grandparent birth data that can objectively identify the Mexican-American third generation with no ethnic attrition. In replicating and extending a recent NBER working paper that uses the NLSY-97, this report affirms that although Mexican-Americans make progress over time, the third generation still has significantly lower education and earnings compared to fourth-plus generation white Americans.
Unfortunately, because the NLSY-97 data set is relatively small, the magnitudes of these difference are subject to considerable uncertainty. If grandparent birthplaces were incorporated into a larger data set such as the Current Population Survey, much more detailed and precise estimates could be calculated.
https://www.cis.org/Report/Grandchildren-LowSkill-Immigrants-Have-Lagging-Education-and-Earnings
