TY  - JOUR
AU  - Abramitzky, Ran
AU  - Boustan, Leah Platt
AU  - Jácome, Elisa
AU  - Pérez, Santiago
TI  - Intergenerational Mobility of Immigrants in the US over Two Centuries
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 26408
PY  - 2019
Y2  - October 2019
DO  - 10.3386/w26408
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w26408
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w26408.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Ran Abramitzky
Department of Economics
Stanford University
579 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Tel: 650/723-9276
Fax: 650/725-5702
E-Mail: ranabr@stanford.edu

Leah Platt Boustan
Princeton University
Industrial Relations Section
Louis A. Simpson International Bldg.
Princeton, NJ 08544
Tel: 609-258-7116
E-Mail: lboustan@princeton.edu

Elisa Jacome
E-Mail: ejacome@princeton.edu

Santiago Pérez
Department of Economics
University of California at Davis
One Shields Avenue
Davis, CA 95616
E-Mail: seperez@ucdavis.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2020-01-23
AB  - Using millions of father-son pairs spanning more than 100 years of US history, we find that children of immigrants from nearly every sending country have higher rates of upward mobility than children of the US-born. Immigrants’ advantage is similar historically and today despite dramatic shifts in sending countries and US immigration policy. In the past, this advantage can be explained by immigrants moving to areas with better prospects for their children and by “under-placement” of the first generation in the income distribution. These findings are consistent with the “American Dream” view that even poorer immigrants can improve their children’s prospects.
ER  -