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Immigrant assimilation pre and post labour market entry: evidence from the UK Labour Force Survey

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Abstract

We estimate models of employment an earnings for a sample of white and non-white male immigrants drawn from the Labour Force Survey between 1993 and 2004. Immigrants who arrived to enter the labour market (labour market entrants) are distinguished from those who arrived to complete their education (education entrants). Diverse patterns of labour market assimilation are found depending on ethnicity and immigrant type. Amongst labour market entrants, whites do better than non-whites, whilst amongst education entrants, highly qualified prime-age non-whites perform as well as their white counterparts. Relative to white natives, labour market outcomes for all immigrant groups have a tendency to decline with age.

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Notes

  1. Prime Minister’s speech to the Confederation of British Industry, April 27th, 2004. This is also the source of the 0.5% contribution to growth statistic.

  2. Chiswick (1978) and Borjas (1985) are classic references for the USA, while Bell (1997) examined the UK. Antecol et al. (2006) is a recent example, which takes a cross-country perspective examining Australia, Canada and the USA.

  3. We also re-estimated the models using hourly wages and obtained qualitatively similar results.

  4. Further details on the sampling methodology and questionnaires are available from the Economic and Social Data Service (www.esds.ac.uk).

  5. Of course, one could easily imagine an immigrant working either in the origin or destination country for some period before undertaking education in the destination country. Without a more detailed panel or life history data, it is very difficult to ascertain whether this is the case for any sample member. We can, however, examine the age at which individuals left full-time education; if this is implausibly high, then the assumption of a single continuous period of education may well be flawed. In the LFS data, the proportion of such workers was relatively small; thus, we proceed to make the standard assumption.

  6. In an earlier version of this work, we also included a variable reflecting whether the individual was from an English-speaking country. This was intended to proxy language ability. On the advice of an anonymous referee that this is a poor proxy, we have excluded it here.

  7. We compare white and non-white immigrants with white natives throughout. Given the relative sizes of the white and non-white native samples, it would make little difference if we used all natives as the comparison group.

  8. In practical terms, the separate model for immigrants is estimated as \(Z_{i} - \delta S_{i} = f{\left( {Y_{i} } \right)} + \gamma C_{i} + x_{i} \beta + \varepsilon _{i} \) where d is replaced by its estimate from the native equation. Identical parameter estimates would be obtained by estimating a ‘fully interacted’ pooled model where all explanatory variables were interacted with a dummy variable for being an immigrant.

  9. One further issue with the semi-parametric approach arises from the quasi-discrete nature of the variable Y, which is measured as whole years since migration. Because the data are to be sorted by Y, multiple different sort orders are possible. To overcome this problem we took averages over a large number of sorts of the data. Experimentation suggested that estimates converged after 40 replications of the quasi-differenced regression in Eq. 3.

  10. In spite of the coefficient estimates being similar, the plotted employment and earnings profiles suggest that the semi-parametric model picks up types of non-linearity, which would be missed in an approach using a purely parametric or dummy variable model. See in particular the graphs for non-white education entrants (Figs. 3 and 4) below.

  11. We experimented with alternative ages of entry to the labour market for these simulations including 16 and 25. This made little difference to the overall shapes of the profiles.

  12. The profiles were stopped at age 60 as the relatively sparse number of observations after this age made semi-parametric estimation less robust.

  13. The native comparator has the average characteristics of natives but the same level of schooling (12years) as assumed in the immigrant profiles.

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Acknowledgement

We are grateful to both referees as well as seminar participants at the Universities of Nottingham, Birmingham and Sheffield for useful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Errors and omissions are the responsibility of the authors. We are grateful to the Office for National Statistics and the Economic and Social Data Service for making available the data from the Labour Force Survey.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Manchester, P.O. Box 88, Manchester, M60 1QD, UK

    Ken Clark

  2. IZA, Bonn, Germany

    Ken Clark

  3. University of Sheffield, 9 Mappin Street, Sheffield, S11 7BS, UK

    Joanne Lindley

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  1. Ken Clark
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  2. Joanne Lindley
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Correspondence to Joanne Lindley.

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Responsible editor: Klaus F. Zimmermann

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Clark, K., Lindley, J. Immigrant assimilation pre and post labour market entry: evidence from the UK Labour Force Survey. J Popul Econ 22, 175–198 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-007-0173-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-007-0173-4

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