Green Cards and the Location Choices of Immigrants in the United States, 1971-2000

By David A. Jaeger. Social Science Research Network, 2006

114 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper documents where immigrants who enter the U.S. with different types of visas ("green cards") choose to live initially and what determines those location choices. Using population data on immigrants from the Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1971 to 2000, matched to data on state characteristics from the Integrated Public Use Microsamples of the U.S. Census, I estimate conditional logit models with the 48 contiguous U.S. states as the choice set. Like previous researchers, I estimate that immigrants have a higher probability of moving to states where individuals from their region of birth represent a larger share of the state population, with relatives of legal permanent residents responding most to this factor. I also find that, in general, immigrants in all admission categories respond to labor market conditions when choosing where to live, but that these effects were the largest for male employment-based immigrants and, surprisingly, refugees.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/24a4fed3e1de857a0ad3793a598e6a92b1301328

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Citations in the corpus

Immigration and Economic Growth in the OECD Countries, 1986-2006 (2016, background): “Indeed, immigrants tend to settle where networks exist (Bartel, 1989; Jaeger, 2007), and past immigration concentrations are unlikely to be related to current economic shocks.”
The labour market impact of immigration (2008, methodology): “Winter-Ebmer and Zweimuller (1996) use the spatial approach outlined above, as well as an alternative strategy that slices the national labour market across industries, to study the impact of immigration on average wages of young Austrians. Both methodologies show that immigration had a positive imp”
Employment, Wages, and the Economic Cycle: Differences between Immigrants and Natives (2009, unknown): “Self-selection of immigrants into regions that offer the highest wages and lowest unemployment rates has been documented by a number of studies (see, for instance, Borjas 2001, and, more recently, Jaeger 2007).”