The Immigrant Advantage in US Intergenerational Mobility

In earlier work, we find that children of immigrants from nearly every sending country achieve higher rates of upward economic mobility than children of the US-born, both in the past and today We identified the mechanisms behind this advantage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when geography played the central role: immigrants tended to settle in places that offered better economic opportunities for all children who grew up there. For the modern period, however, we have not had the data needed to understand why children of immigrants continue to experience greater upward mobility—until now.

With new data in hand, the goal of this project is to explain the modern immigrant mobility advantage. Do children of immigrants do better because their parents choose better neighborhoods, marry at higher rates, or work more? Are immigrant parents more educated than their earnings would suggest? Do they have different aspirations for their children or approach parenting differently from US-born parents with similar incomes? And when children of immigrants out-earn their peers as adults, is this because they obtain more education, work more hours, or earn more within the same occupation? To answer these questions, we link federal income tax records with Social Security Administration records, the Census, and the American Community Survey. We also combine these administrative data with nationally representative surveys that measure parents’ expectations for their children and their views of good parenting. Together, these data allow us to study not only where immigrant families live and how much they earn, but also their expectations, choices, and parenting practices.