It is well known that immigrants have an economic disadvantage when they first enter the United States. Many are not fluent in English; they are not familiar with how the US labor market works; and on and on. So it is not surprising that, at first, they earn far less than natives. Over time, the immigrants learn the language, acquire new skills, and begin to “catch up” or assimilate to the native norm.
Economic assimilation is obviously an important component of any assessment of the impact of immigration. And despite all the hype claiming that immigrants today are assimilating just as well as earlier waves did (including another NAS report focusing specifically on assimilation and released just one year ago; here’s that report and the media spin), the new NAS report gives a far more realistic and measured assessment of the situation.
Male immigrants who arrived between 1965 and 1969 experienced rapid growth in their relative wages, which allowed them to close the gap with native-born peers. This indication of economic integration has shown signs of slowing in more recent decades. The relative wage profile has flattened somewhat across recent arrival cohorts, indicating a slowing rate of wage convergence.
These trends generally corroborate the finding…that earlier cohorts of immigrants experienced more rapid language assimilation than recent cohorts.
The NAS analysis of trends in immigrant skills brings to the immigration debate a new and important fact: There has been a slowdown in the economic assimilation of immigrants. Even though we do not yet fully understand why this slowdown occurred, there is a crucial question lurking underneath: What does the assimilation slowdown mean for the future?