Human Capital Investment, 1st ed. 2020 A History of Asian Immigrants and Their Family Ties

In 1965, a family-reunification policy for admitting immigrants to the United States replaced a system that chose immigrants based on their national origin. With this change, a 40-year hiatus in Asian immigration ended. Today, over three-quarters of US immigrants originate from Asia and Latin America. Two issues that dominate discussions of US immigration policy are the progress of post-reform immigrants and their contributions to the US economy.

This book focuses on the earnings and human capital investment of Asian immigrants to the US after 1965. In addition, it provides a primer on studying immigrant economic assimilation, by explaining economists? methodology to measure immigrant earnings growth and the challenges with this approach. The book also illustrates strategies to more fully use census data such as how to measure family income and how to use ?panel data? that is embedded in the census.

1. Introduction: Background and Overview
2. What Caused the Decline in Immigrant Entry Earnings?
3. The Immigrant Human Capital Investment Model
4. Methodological Implications of a Human Capital Investment Perspective
5. The Earnings Growth of Asian versus European Immigrants
6. The Earnings Profiles of Immigrant Men in Specific Asian Groups
7. Modeling the Effect of a Factor Associated with Low Skill Transferability: Family Admissions and Immigrant Earnings Profiles
8. Human Capital Investment
9. Permanence and the Propensity to Invest
10. Family Income
11. Exploring Conventional Explanations for the High Labor Force Participation of Women in the Asian Developing-Country Groups
12. Husbands and Wives: Work Decisions in a Family Investment Model
13. Following Cohorts of Married Immigrant Women
14. Unpaid Family Labor
15. Beyond the Immediate Family
16. Entry Earnings, Earnings Growth, and Human Capital Investment: The 1985-90 and 1995-2000 Cohorts
17. The Impact of Refugee Status
18. The Earnings and Human Capital Investment of South East Asian Refugees: The 1975-1980 Cohort
19. The Economic Status of Married Refugee Women from South East Asia: The 1975-1980 Cohort
20. Refugee Entrants from South East Asia a Decade after the War: The 1985-1990 Cohort
21. A Longer Perspective on Initial Conditions and Immigrant Adjustment
22. Concluding Remarks

Harriet Duleep is Research Professor of Public Policy at the College of William and Mary, USA. She is also a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor and the Global Labour Organization.

Mark C. Regets is Senior Fellow at the National Foundation for American Policy, USA. He is also a Research Fellow at the Institute for Labor Economics and the Global Labour Organization.

Seth Sanders is Professor of Economics at Cornell University, USA. He is also a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor. He was previously the Director of the Duke University Population Research Center.

Provides an original and timely contribution to the literature about the effects of US immigration policy and the economic status of Asian immigrants

Proposes a richer model for studying immigrant earnings that incorporates investments in human capital by immigrants and their families

Provides a primer on how to study immigrant economic assimilation