Poster #100 - Does Marrying a Native Improve Immigrant Employment? Evidence from U.S. Labor Markets

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

Marriage-based migration sits at the center of current U.S. immigration policy debates, with recent enforcement actions and regulatory changes targeting spousal and family-based visa pathways. A foundational empirical question underlies these debates: does marriage to a native-born citizen actually improve immigrant labor market outcomes, and if so, how? A substantial cross-national literature suggests it does, with studies across Australia, France, the Netherlands, and the United States documenting positive associations between intermarriage and immigrant wages or employment. Yet panel-based identification strategies consistently find that much of this apparent premium reflects pre-existing differences between those who do and do not intermarry, rather than the marriage itself. Whether a causal employment benefit exists, and through which mechanisms it operates, remains an open question in a long-run, diverse U.S. setting. This paper estimates the causal effect of marriage to a native-born spouse on immigrant employment probability using harmonized microdata from the 2000 U.S. Census and the American Community Survey covering 2001 to 2022. The analysis focuses on prime-age, married, non-native-English-speaking immigrants residing in identifiable metropolitan statistical areas, the population for whom the theoretical mechanisms of intermarriage are predicted to be most consequential. To address selection into intermarriage, I instrument for marriage to a native using variation in the share of immigrant women among all women in the local marriage market across metropolitan areas and years. When immigrant women are relatively more abundant locally, immigrant men face a more accessible co-ethnic partner pool and are less likely to marry a native-born spouse. The sample is further divided at 2012, using the DACA announcement as an externally motivated policy break that prior work shows reshaped the formation of mixed marriages by altering legal-status uncertainty. Three findings emerge. First, the average causal effect of intermarriage on employment over the full sample is small and statistically indistinguishable from zero, consistent with the most demanding identification strategies in the literature and qualifying earlier positive cross-sectional benchmarks for the United States. Second, this average masks important temporal variation: the post-2012 employment effect is substantially larger and statistically significant, while the pre-2012 estimate is imprecise, suggesting that the returns to intermarriage on the employment margin are historically contingent rather than structurally constant. Third, mediation analysis indicates that naturalization is not the dominant channel linking intermarriage to employment, while geographic relocation into large metropolitan labor markets is a more empirically salient pathway, particularly in the 2000 Census sample. These findings carry direct policy relevance. Current U.S. immigration enforcement has focused heavily on the legal-status dimension of mixed-status and marriage-based households. The evidence here suggests that the more economically consequential channel through which a native spouse improves immigrant employment runs through place rather than legal status. Evaluating the labor market consequences of family-based migration requires attending to where intermarried couples live and what labor markets they access, not only to how quickly legal status is transferred.

Author

• VAIBHAV OJHA, Boston College
  Presenting Author