Volume 38, Number 1 (Winter) 2003
Antecol, Heather, Deborah A. Cobb-Clark, and Stephen J. Trejo. 2003. "Immigration Policy and the Skills of Immigrants to Australia, Canada and the United States." Journal of Human Resources 38(1): 192-218.
Census data for 1990/91 indicate that Australian and Canadian immigrants have higher levels of English fluency, education, and income (relative to natives) than do U.S. immigrants. This skill deficit for U.S. immigrants arises primarily because the United States receives a much larger share of immigrants from Latin America than do the other two countries. After excluding Latin American immigrants, the observable skills of immigrants are similar in the three countries. These patterns suggest that the comparatively low overall skill level of U.S. immigrants may have more to do with geographic and historical ties to Mexico than with the fact that skill-based admissions are less important in the United States than in Australia and Canada.
Heather Antecol is an assistant professor of economics at Claremont McKenna College. Deborah Cobb-Clark is director of the Social Policy Evaluation, Analysis, and Research Centre at the Australian National University, and Stephen Trejo is an associate professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin. For advice and comments, the authors thank George Borjas, Bruce Chapman, Bob Gregory, Peter Kuhn, Jeffrey Reitz. and two anonymous referees. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning August 2003 through July 2006 from Heather Antecol, Department of Economics, Claremont McKenna College, 500 E. Ninth Street, Claremont, CA 91711.
© 2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X