Poster #78 - Mismatch in the Labor Market: High-Skill Immigrants and Their Underutilization

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

This study investigates the issue of “occupational mismatch” among highly educated immigrants, defined as those arriving with a college degree or higher, who frequently encounter barriers to fully utilizing their skills in the U.S. labor market. Many of these individuals find themselves employed in positions that do not correspond to their qualifications. Given all the immigration debates, immigrants from some regions of the world struggle much more than others to utilize their college or advanced degrees. Consequently, policymakers should be cautious when designing a new immigration system similar to Canada that selects for education. Employing the realized matches technique developed by Chiswick and Miller (2010) and using ACS data, we descriptively show how natives and immigrants vary in their years of education by occupation and source country. Specifically, we define the skill level of an occupation as the average years of education held by natives working in that occupation. Then, we rank the occupations by their skill level and categorize them into four groups such as the bottom third ("lower skill"), middle third ("middle skill"), top third ("higher skill"), and top tenth ("elite skill").  Next, we compare the skill level of immigrants and natives by their source country and occupation.  Our preliminary findings show that advanced degree holders, both immigrant and native alike, have substantially higher occupational skill levels than college graduates. Central American immigrants with a college degree are marginally more likely to be in low-skill occupations than in high-skill ones. To better understand “skill” mismatch, we incorporate O*NET data, which allows us to classify jobs as cognitive, non-routine cognitive, and manual labor. In addition, we study the heterogeneity in the degree of occupational mismatch by the abilities most salient in specific occupations as well as the primary language of immigrant origin countries.

Author

• Elif B Dilden, Rockhurst University
  Presenting Author