Convergence Between Black Immigrants and Black Natives Across ...

The Earning-Age of Immigration profile is more positively sloped for African and Caribbean blacks
than those of other races. For Africans it is steeply upward sloping for both men and women. Both, African
men and women on average have higher earnings premia than black Caribbeans. Refugees have a even
steeper earnings-age of immigration profile than non-refugees, suggesting that deliberate location choice is
not driving this pattern. Refugee men have exceptionally high return on their unobservables. This is in line
with Cortes’s (2004) finding that from 1980 to 1990 refugees made greater gains in English proficiency,
working hours, and wages, than economic immigrants.
Black immigrants are much more likely than Asians and Hispanics to come from countries where English
is an official language. This could lead to a decreased weight placed on arriving early. To explore this
hypothesis, Figure 9e and Figure 9f split black immigrants into blacks who come from countries where
English is an official language and those that do not. Immigrants from English speaking countries indeed
have a less negatively sloped gradient for men and a more positively sloped gradient for women. Immigrants
from countries where English is not listed as an official language still have a considerably less negatively
sloped earnings-age of immigration profile than Asians and Hispanics.
6 The Importance of Labor Force Participation Differences
6.1 Across Generation Comparison
From Table 2 we already learned that labor force participation decisions differ significantly between blacks
of the first and second generations. While 86% of black first generation males participate in the labor force,
only 81% of age-adjusted second generation males are labor force participants. This difference does not
exist for women where 76% of first generation females and 77% of second generation females participate in
the labor force.
Section 4 established that much of the convergence for women and all of it for men can be explained
by differential labor force attachment propensities across generations. In order to understand more about
the convergence phenomenon, the subsequent regressions focus on labor force participation as an outcome
variable.
Table 7 and 8 focus on black men and women, respectively. In column (1) all immigrants are included.
Columns (2) - (6) limit first generation immigrants to those who spent over 10 years in the US. This allows
us to focus only on permanent immigrants; immigrants who are more likely to be parents of the subsequent
second generation. We see that if all immigrants are included, the decrease in labor force participation is 10
percentage points (.0806 - (-.0196)) for men. When recent immigrants are excluded, the decrease increases
to close to 13 percentage points. Including state fixed effects shrinks the gap to about 11 percentage points.
Column (5) restricts the sample to low-educated individuals (high school degree or less). For low-educated
black men the decrease reaches 18 percentage points. This highlights the importance of differential labor
force attachment for low-educated blacks across generations in explaining the convergence between black
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