Since the 1970s American workers have faced rising wage inequality and increasing wage polarization, featuring stagnation at the lower tail and growth at the upper tail. In particular, college-educated workers have experienced a large variation in returns to the same level of formal education and work experience. The 1990 Immigration Act aimed to bring in skilled immigrants in some specialty fields to fill the identified labor shortage. This policy shift, coupled with Information and Communication Technology revolution, led to a growing foreign-born share of skilled labor and an overrepresentation of the foreign born in selected fields of study. Despite growing research interest very little is known about the impact of immigration and specialized human capital on rising wage inequality. This study focuses on the whole college-educated population, in an effort to assess simultaneously the impact of technology and immigration on the wage distribution of the college-educated population, drawing data from the 1993 and 2003 National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG). The study's intellectual merit comes through its substantive and methodological contributions. First, it develops a theory-based classification scheme for specialized human capital, defined as field of study, to conceptualize the skills among the college-educated. Second, the research apitalizes on the two large cross-sections of national data on all college-educated labor force to perform inter-cohort analysis between new skilled workers in the 1980s and those in the 1990s to identify the effect of ICT innovation vs. diffusion and skilled immigration policy shift. Third, the study examines the cohort evolution of workers who entered the skilled labor before 1980 to examine how ICT and immigration policy differentiate wage growth of different skill groups. Finally, the investigators quantify how technological and policy changes influence the wage inequality and polarization of the college population using the model-based method of quantile regression and quantile regression decomposition.
Broader Impacts. The knowledge generated in this study will make substantial contribution to the literature on immigration, science and technology workforce and social inequality. Findings will bridge research and teaching by effectively impacting curriculum change in both substantive sociology courses and methodology courses. This project will train and mentor graduate and undergraduate students. Two doctoral students are expected to join the research team, in their training to achieve primary concentrations in immigration and inequality. More generally, findings on the specialized human capital will enhance our understanding oft which skill sets are rewarded in the increasingly technology-driven and globalized society
Award Number: 1020452 Award Period: 10/2010 - 09/2012 Principal Investigator: Hao, Lingxin Organization: Johns Hopkins University This project has two related lines of inquiries. First it examines high-skilled immigration and its impact on U.S. high-end wage structure. Special attention was given to the emerging institutional selection of high-skilled immigrants since the 1990 Immigration Act that established the temporary-to-permanent residency pathways for the foreign-born high-skilled. We argue that this policy shift has allowed employers to play a crucial role in the immigration of highly skilled workers through labor-market institutional selection, which gives a salary advantage to high-skilled temporary-admitted workers who remain in the United States through these pathways. Strong evidence to support this argument was obtained from making proper comparisons. We found that the basic salary of workers with comparable levels of degree, fields of occupation, and other demographic characteristics is higher for the temporary-to-permanent group than the basic salary for (1) current high-skilled temporary workers, (2) high-skilled immigrant workers who arrived in the U.S. using a foreign-student visa, (3) high-skilled immigrants who arrived in the U.S. with a permanent residence visa, (4) high-skilled immigrants who were childhood arrivals, and (5) native-born high-skilled workers. The second line of inquiry asks a more fundamental question about high-skilled immigration and the U.S. knowledge structure. We are interested in understanding whether high-skilled immigration plays a structural role in the U.S. transition to a knowledge economy. Our thesis is that inflows of foreign students to U.S. universities and inflows of high-skilled permanent or temporary workers to labs and firms have speeded up the interdependent institutional transformations of higher education and industry and reduced the asymmetry of this transformation between higher education and industry, thereby accelerating the U.S. transition to the knowledge economy. We sought evidence from college-entrance cohorts experiencing various stages of the U.S. transition to the knowledge economy. We examined individuals’ knowledge structure consisting of fields of academic and professional degrees and occupational fields. We found that, when compared with their native-born counterparts (comparable in occupational fields and other labor market and demographic characteristics), the foreign-born high-skilled workforce has led the U.S. transition to knowledge economy as their knowledge structure includes a greater proportion of applied fields in all college-entrance cohorts. This immigration effect is found greater for later cohorts than for earlier cohorts. Overall, our findings suggest that high-skilled immigration has transformative impacts on American society in very different ways from labor immigration. One unique impact of high-skilled immigration is through shaping the American scientific workforce and restructuring the American knowledge structure. The routinized recruitment of foreign engineers, scientists, and health care professionals has not only changed the composition of these fields but also increased the links and collaboration between industry and institutions of higher-education. The temporary employment of college graduates directly from universities of foreign countries has enabled employers to double screen high-skilled workers leading to selection of workers with high productivity resulting in high basic salaries. These findings offer important insights for immigration policy markers to design effective policy to maximize the positive impacts of high-skilled immigration. They also suggest the merit of immigration policy that supports temporary-to-permanent pathways and a need to understand whether this path also works for labor immigrants. Our project has also contributed to the training of next-generation researchers through research team activities, Ph.D. dissertation advising, course work, and course mini-projects.
