What's in a name? Country-of-origin influences on the earnings of immigrants in the United States.

"In this paper we focus on the migration-related processes that may lead to the well-documented differences in earnings and in naturalization rates across country-of-origin groups in the United States. Our theoretical framework examines how the forces of selectivity associated with the decisions by residents of non-U.S. countries to migrate to the United States and with the decisions by foreign-born U.S. residents to remain in the United States are influenced by country conditions and are reflected ultimately in the observed earnings differences among the 'survivors' of these processes who are enumerated in U.S. sample surveys. In particular, we assess how economic conditions, origin-country attractiveness, costs of migration, the quantity and quality of information, and the country-specific restrictions of U.S. immigration law influence both who migrates to and, among the migrants, who remains in the United States. The framework is applied to two U.S. data sets--a sample of the foreign born in the 1980 Census and a sample from the 1971 cohort of legal immigrants." excerpt