The Economist features Villarreal and Tamborini paper

Drawing on work by Faculty Associate Andrés Villarreal and External Affiliate Christopher Tamborini (U.S. Social Security Administration), The Economist reports on the status of "Immigrants and the Wage Gap."

The article evaluates the Trump administration assertion that those who move the U.S. illegally "are not bad people" but that "they don't integrate well; they don't have skills," as Chief of Staff John Kelly said.

Using a dataset that links a nationally representative survey with 20 years of individual tax records from respondents, Villarreal and Tamborini "confirm parts of the existing consensus," the author states, "but the results also present three challenges to the view that the low quality of recent immigrants is slowing economic assimilation."

1. Recent immigrants are doing no worse than previous waves and possibly are doing better;

2. Education and experience do not appear to account for much of the earnings gap between migrants and natives;

3. When accounting for ethnicity Immigrants all see rapid and considerable convergence towards the earnings levels of natives with the same education and experience.

See the complete article in The Economist

See the paper in American Sociological Review