The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Assimilation, Changes in Cohort Quality, and the Earnings of Immigrants
Abstract
This paper reexamines the empirical basis for two "facts" that seem to be found in most cross-section studies of immigrant earnings: (1) the earnings of immigrants grow rapidly as they assimilate into the United States; and (2) this rapid growth leads to many immigrants' overtaking the earnings of the natives within 10-15 years after immigration. Using the 1970 and 1980 U.S. censuses, this paper studies the earnings growth experienced by specific immigrant cohorts during the period 1970-80. It is found that within-cohort growth is significantly smaller than the growth predicted by cross-section regressions for most immigrant groups. This differential is consistent with the hypothesis that there has been a secular decline in the "quality" of immigrants admitted to the United States.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cited by
Rethinking Assimilation Theory for a New Era of Immigration
Alba, R., & Nee, V. (1997) · International Migration Review · doi:10.1177/019791839703100403 · Cited by 1,633
Economic Theory and International Migration
Borjas, G. J. (1989) · International Migration Review · doi:10.1177/019791838902300304 · Cited by 836
Self-citationWho Leaves? The Outmigration of the Foreign-Born
Borjas, G. J., & Bratsberg, B. (1996) · The Review of Economics and Statistics · doi:10.2307/2109856 · Cited by 797
Self-citationAn Evaluation of International Migration Theory: The North American Case
Massey, D. S., Arango, J., Hugo, G., Kouaouci, A., Pellegrino, A., & Taylor, J. E. (1994) · Population and Development Review · doi:10.2307/2137660 · Cited by 567
The Economics of Temporary Migrations
Dustmann, C., & Görlach, J.-S. (2016) · Journal of Economic Literature · doi:10.1257/jel.54.1.98 · Cited by 339
Metadata
- Authors
- Borjas, G. J.
- Venue
- Journal of Labor Economics
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 1985-10
- Volume
- 3
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 463-489
- ISSN
- 0734-306X (ISSN-L)
- 1537-5307
- OpenAlex
- W1991113213
- Cited by
- 1,675
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 48.81
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Assimilation, Changes in Cohort Quality, and the Earnings of Immigrants. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/298065
- The paper
- Borjas, G. J. (1985). Assimilation, Changes in Cohort Quality, and the Earnings of Immigrants. Journal of Labor Economics. https://doi.org/10.1086/298065
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
