Convergence Between Black Immigrants and Black Natives Across ...

8 Conclusion
This paper adds to the existing literature on three dimensions. First, it lays out the fact that black immigrants
have become a large part of the black population in the last decades. Second, it demonstrates that the
characteristics of immigrant blacks are very different from those of native blacks. Third, it determines how
much immigrants blacks converge to native blacks across and within a generation. To put these patterns into
perspective, they are compared to those of other races/ethnicities.
The share of black immigrants among the black population in the US has increased from 1% in the
1970s to 11% in 2011. Black immigrant males’ earnings and wages are higher than those of native blacks
but the premium is small once we condition on being employed. Employment, education, incarceration,
and marriage outcomes confirm that we are dealing with two completely different subsets of the population.
Black immigrants are much more likely than native blacks to be employed, married, highly educated and not
incarcerated.
In summary, first generation black immigrants undoubtedly have better labor market outcomes than black
natives. They directly pass on some characteristics such as high human capital investments to the next generation.
The transmission of labor force attachment seems to be weaker, suggesting that the second generation
is converging to natives. Black immigrants do not only converge to black natives across generations but
also within a generation. For Asians and Hispanics, earnings premia decrease monotonically with age of
immigration. For blacks, the earnings-age of immigration profile is upward sloping for those immigrating
before the age of 15. Convergence across generations is mostly driven by low-educated second generation
blacks that drop out of the labor force in greater numbers than low-educated first generation immigrants do.
Similarly, convergence within a generation is driven by the fact that black first generation immigrants who
arrive at an early age have a weaker labor force attachment than immigrants who arrive in the US when they
are older. A social interactions model with an assimilation parameter that varies by age of immigration helps
explain this phenomenon for men. When making their labor force participation decision, male immigrants
generally place more weight on the characteristics of natives the earlier they immigrate.
References
[1] Abramitzky, Ran, Leah Boustan, and Katherine Eriksson. 2012. “A Nation of Immigrants: Assimilation
and Economic Outcomes in the Age of Mass Migration”.
[2] Becker, Gary S., and Nigel Tomes. 1979. “An equilibrium theory of the distribution of income and
intergenerational mobility”. Journal of Political Economy 87: 1153–1189.
[3] Bhattacharya, Debopam, and Bhashkar Mazumder 2007. “Nonparametric analysis of intergenerational
income mobility with application to the United States”. Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago WP 2007-12.
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