The Role of Firms in Immigration Assimilation and Labor Market Adjustment

Support for research and the development of a proposal to study the impact and assimilation of immigrant workers into the U.S. labor market. The project will use the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) database to gain new insights into the various economic, sociological, and political debates surrounding these issues. This data has three unique advantages. First the first panel of earnings is large enough to include tens of millions of immigrants. This allows us to see the economic progress of individual immigrants over time in the U.S. as well as the native-born workers that immigrants potentially displace. Second, from the sutdy they  can observe the firms in which workers are employed and have panel data on these firms. This allows insight into the different choices that firms make as the local availability of immigrant labor varies across time and location. Choices include capital intensity, product mix, workforce skill mix, workforce demographic composition, firm size, and use of advanced technologies and the establishment of multiple sites. It also allows us to relate these firm choices to the rate of wage growth of immigrants and rate of displacement and post-displacement wages of native-born workers. Finally, the link to the demographic surveys allows us to conduct important subgroup analyses such as differentiating the assimilation process for immigrants or the displacement adjustment for native-born workers by their level of education.