Occupational Attainment of Natives and Immigrants: A Cross-Cohort Analysis

Abstract

I compare the occupational attainment of male US immigrant and native workers using the task-based approach. Immigrants have on average higher manual and lower analytical and interactive task requirements than natives, and this gap has expanded greatly in the past several decades. The occupational assimilation toward natives in task requirements observed for earlier cohorts has slowed significantly for more recent cohorts. The increased size of both country of origin and linguistic groups as well as declining English language acquisition help to explain the assimilation slowdown. Controlling for task requirements helps to explain the earnings assimilation slowdown.