The Labor Supply of Immigrants in the United States: The Role of Changing Source Country Characteristics

Economists have long explored the role that source country characteristics have in determining the labor market performance of immigrants. For example, George J. Borjas (1987) models the migration decision as determined by the expected difference in the immigrant’s position in the earnings distribution in the host and source countries. Deborah A. Cobb-Clark (1993) extends Borjas’s model to immigrant women. Similarly, other studies explore how culture or traditional gender roles in the source country persist across borders and influence the labor market outcomes of immigrant women in the United States. For example, Heather Antecol (2000, 2001) and Francine D. Blau, Lawrence M. Kahn, and Kerry L. Papps (2008) find a positive relationship between source country characteristics and the labor market outcomes of immigrant women in the US. Absent from the existing literature, however, is an examination of how changes over time in a source country’s characteristics are associated with changes in the labor market outcomes of immigrants from that source country. In this paper, we study how changes in the source country characteristics are associated with changes in the labor supply outcomes of immigrants in the US, and whether these relationships are different across men and women. In particular, we focus on the changes in three The Labor Supply of Immigrants in the United States: The Role of Changing Source Country Characteristics