Wage Mobility of Foreign-Born Workers in the United States

This paper presents new evidence on whether foreign-born workers assimilate. While the existing literature focuses on the convergence / divergence of average wages, this study extends the analysis to the distribution of wages by looking at wage mobility. We measure the foreign-native gap in year-to-year transition probabilities from one decile group to another of a wage distribution, where the deciles are determined by native samples. Our results, based on the Current Population Survey for 1996-2008, suggest that immigrants in middle and bottom decile groups, who are the majority of immigrants, tend to fall behind relative to natives in the same decile groups.