Immigrants' Progress: Ethnic and Gender Differences among U.S. Immigrants in the 1980s

Using data from the June 1986 and June 1988 Current Population Surveys, we look at differences in occupational achievement, education, occupational prestige, and per capita income among a large number of first-generation immigrant groups. We seek to explore a central question in the debate about the economic prospects of immigrants: Do groups convert education into occupational prestige in similar ways? To address this issue, we examine differences in estimated rates of returns to socioeconomic occupational scores for education among immigrant groups. Notwithstanding language difficulties and unfamiliarity with the labor market—characteristics that we could not measure with this dataset—the labor market experiences of higher-skilled immigrants appear not to differ appreciably from that of native whites of native parentage. By contrast, low-skilled immigrants are concentrated in low-level jobs where the structure of employment seems to limit the rewards to additional gains in skill.