Abstract
Debates about revising U.S. legal immigration policies tend to question the economic value of immigrants sponsored by family members rather than by employers. To date, little evidence has been cited. This article uses the latest data to measure legal immigrants’ characteristics and economic outcomes by class of entry, comparing employment rates, self-employment rates, and occupational outcomes of family-sponsored immigrants, humanitarian migrants, and diversity visa immigrants with those of employer-sponsored immigrants. It finds that most legal, permanent immigrants to the United States show high employment rates relative to the overall U.S. population after several years in the country, but that employment-sponsored immigrants and their spouses bring the highest education and English proficiency and work in the most highly skilled occupations both initially and over time.
- © 2020 Russell Sage Foundation. Gelatt, Julia. 2020. “Do Employer-Sponsored Immigrants Fare Better in Labor Markets Than Family-Sponsored Immigrants?” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 6(3): 70–93. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2020.6.3.04. The author thanks participants at the Russell Sage Foundation conference The Legal Landscape of U.S. Immigration in the Twenty-First Century, Sarah Bohn, and three anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this article. Direct correspondence to: Julia Gelatt at jgelatt{at}migrationpolicy.org, Migration Policy Institute, 1400 16th St., NW, Suite 300, Washington, D.C. 20036, United States.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.