This archive report was first published on 2 November 2019.
Published on November 2, 2019, a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research revealed a surprising trend in economic mobility.
While many immigrants earn less than their US-born counterparts, their children tend to catch up and even out-earn children of US-born parents.
According to the researchers, children of immigrants from nearly every country have higher rates of upward mobility than children of US-born individuals.
“Children of immigrants from nearly every sending country have higher rates of upward mobility than the children of the U.S.-born,” say publishers of the paper (Ran Abramitzky of Stanford, Leah Platt Boustan and Elisa Jacome of Princeton University, and Santiago Perez of the University of California at Davis).
The study's findings suggest that recent immigrants are moving up the economic scale, just like those who immigrated to the US a century ago.
“Although some politicians have a short-term perspective on immigrant assimilation, our findings suggest that this view might underestimate the long-run success of immigrants,” the researchers noted.
