Seminar Series: From Temporary To Permanent: Extended Internal Labor Markets and Skilled Immigration To the U.S.

About the Talk

Before 1990, foreign skilled workers primarily came to the U.S. on permanent resident visas.  Since the Immigration Act of 1990, the number of arriving skilled workers has increased with a rising share using temporary worker visas.  The legislation also created an opportunity for a transition from temporary to permanent status.  This paper develops and tests a new approach to understanding the transition through the emergence of "extended internal labor markets" (EILM).  The EILM institutionalizes a temporary worker recruiting mechanism and a "good" worker selection mechanism under a closed system that may significantly shorten the timing of temporary-to-permanent transition.  The influence of the EILM is differentially reflected in the experience of temporary worker visa holders vs. student visa holders.  Exploiting relatively reliable retrospective data from a national survey, we test our hypotheses using event history analysis of the temporary-to-permanent transition, which has not been done in previous research.  Following two entry cohorts carefully defined right before and after the policy shift's implementation in 1992, our analysis for temporary worker visa holders provides robust evidence in favor of the empirical implications that the EILM recruiting and selecting mechanisms combined shortens the timing of the transition by 27%.  The weaker findings for student visa holders suggest that the open market recruitment of students may hinder the post-hiring selection mechanism.

About the Speaker

Lingxin Hao is Professor of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University.  Her areas of specialty include immigration, family and public policy, social inequality, social demography, and quantitative methodology.  She has been the principle investigator for several multi-year projects supported by NIH and NSF.  Her publications from these projects have examined the impact of immigration on social inequality, assimilation of immigrant generations, poverty, welfare policy, and single-mother families.  Dr. Hao's approach is theoretically driven quantitative research, using nationally representative data.  Dr. Hao and her colleagues have published articles in American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Social Forces, International Migration Review, Sociology of Education, Journal of Marriage and Family, Social Science Research, Sociological Methodology, Sociological Methods and Research, and others.  Her book Color Lines, Country Lines: Race, Immigration, and Wealth Stratification is a detailed examination of immigrant wealth accumulation and immigration's impact on racial stratification of wealth in the U.S.  Dr. Hao and her coauthors' two QASS book series, Quantile Regression and Inequality Measures address methods for inequality research.  Dr. Hao earned her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1990.

Website: http://www.soc.jhu.edu/people/hao/index.html