Quite often, migrants appear to exert little effort to absorb the mainstream culture and to learn the language of their host society, even though the economic returns (increased productivity and enhanced earnings) to assimilation are high. We show that when interpersonal comparisons affect...

Restricting immigration to young and skilled immigrants using a point system, as in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, succeeds in selecting economically desirable immigrants and provides orderly management of population growth. But the point system cannot fix short-term skilled labor shortages...

The health status of people is a precious commodity and central to economic, socio-political, and environmental dimensions of any country. Yet it is often the missing statistic in all general statistics, demographics, and presentations about the portrait of immigrants and natives. In this paper...

Economic theory suggests that selective immigration policies based on observable characteristics will affect unobservable migrant quality. Little empirical evidence exists on this hypothesis. We quantify traditionally unobservable components of migrant quality in Australia, a high-migrant share...

The health status of people is a precious commodity and central to economic, socio-political, and environmental dimensions of any country. Yet it is often the missing statistic in all general statistics, demographics, and presentations about the portrait of immigrants and natives. In this paper...

Results presented in this paper based on the new database on immigrants and expatriates in OECD countries, show that (i) the percentage of the foreign-born in European OECD countries is generally higher than the percentage of foreigners; (ii) international migration is quite selective towards...

This paper examines ethnicity among highly skilled immigrants to the United States. The paper focuses on five classic components of ethnicity - country of birth, race, skin color, language, and religion - among persons admitted to legal permanent residence in the United States in 2003 in the...

This paper provides cross-country macro evidence on the effect of immigration on productivity. It combines panel data with instrumental variables to correct for OLS biases due to reverse causality. In particular, it introduces push-targeting instruments; they constitute a new approach to find...

Highly skilled immigrants to the United States (HSIs), particularly those with graduate degrees in science, engineering, technology, and math (STEM) fields, have helped catalyze innovation, economic growth, jobs, wealth, and advances in human welfare. America has been attractive to HSIs and...