In this section, I draw on Blau, Kahn, and Papps (2011) and Blau and Kahn (forthcoming) to examine the relationship between source country female labor supply and immigrant women’s labor supply behavior in the United States. We focus on adult immigrants since they are most likely to be affected by source country patterns and on married women for whom gender roles are expected to have a greater effect. (Our results were similar, however, when we included all women.) Outcomes are conceptualized as reflecting the combined effect of the assimilation process and the persistent impact of source country culture.
Drawing on Blau et al. (2011), I first consider the relationship between the assimilation of immigrant women’s labor supply and gender roles in the source country, using the 1980–2000 US Censuses. The assimilation profiles that we estimate show the relationship between immigrant women’s time in the United States or years since migration (YSM) and their labor supply behavior. The assimilation profile is of interest in that it sheds light on what happens to immigrant women’s labor supply behavior as they are exposed to US labor market conditions and social norms. We find a strong and persistent effect of source country female relative labor supply on immigrant women’s US labor supply behavior. I present a number of results from Blau et al. (2011) that suggest these findings do indeed reflect the impact of a community-level characteristic like culture. I provide further evidence in support of this interpretation from the Blau and Kahn (forthcoming) study, which uses data from the New Immigrant Survey (NIS) to more finely control for immigrant women’s behavior prior to migrating, as well as to separately identify the effect of culture vs. social capital.
2.1 A role for culture? Source country female labor supply and immigrant assimilation
A focus on assimilation of immigrant women’s labor supply raises the question of the shape of labor supply profile with time in the United States and how (or if) it may differ between women from source countries with more and less traditional gender roles. The standard expectation might be that the assimilation profile would be upward sloping for both husbands and wives, where immigrants would start at a disadvantage relative to otherwise similar individuals due to the disruptions of immigration that could lead to difficulty in finding a job or to temporarily working positive, but less than desired, hours. The impact of such disruptions is expected to decrease over time, and immigrant labor supply is expected to approach that of natives. A period of disruption may be even more likely for married women than married men to the extent women are “tied movers” (Mincer 1978)—i.e., if the move is determined primarily based on the husband’s labor market prospects rather than the wife’s. In addition, some types of visas obtained by husbands (generally the primary earner) may not permit their spouse to work.Footnote 4
An intriguing alternative possibility is raised by the family migration model proposed by Baker and Benjamin (1997) that predicts immigrant women will initially take dead-end jobs to finance their husbands’ human capital investments and eventually drop out of the labor market or reduce their labor supply as their husbands’ labor market outcomes improve. Rather than convergence toward native labor supply levels, this model predicts a negatively-sloped labor supply profile for immigrant women relative to natives, a finding that has been observed for Canada (Baker and Benjamin 1997) but not for the United States (Blau et al. 2003). The logic of the family migration model suggests that source country gender roles within the family might be a factor in influencing the shape of women’s assimilation profiles, with the family migration model perhaps holding for families coming from countries with a more traditional division of labor by gender. Our empirical specification, described below, permits us to investigate the possibility. However, in fact, we find upward sloping profiles for all groups.
Before turning to more detailed estimates, I first consider whether simple tabulations suggest a relationship between gender roles in immigrant source countries and immigrant women’s labor supply behavior in the United States. Figure 1 shows the average labor supply behavior of (adult) immigrant women and their native counterparts in 1980 and 2000; Figure 2 presents similar information for men. Recall that, over this time, there has been a shift in immigrant source countries potentially affecting the mix of gender roles in the countries of origin and the labor supply behavior of immigrant women in the United States.
Figure 1 indicates that, in both years, immigrant women have lower labor supply (measured by average annual work hours, including those with zero hours) and, moreover, that the immigrant-native labor supply gap increased considerably between 1980 and 2000: in 1980, natives worked 66 h (8%) more than immigrants; by 2000, the gap was 319 h (32%).Footnote 5 This reflects increasing labor supply for both groups of women, but a sharper increase for native women. Figure 2 shows that immigrant men also worked fewer hours than their native counterparts on average, but in this case the immigrant-native gap increased only slightly, from immigrants working 8% fewer hours than native men in 1980 to working 11% less by 2000. Thus, the immigrant-native gap in labor supply increased much more for women than for men. This suggests a gender role dimension to the trend, and that impression is reinforced by the results in Fig. 3.
Figure 3 shows, for 1980 and 2000, the average across immigrant women of the female activity rate ratio (F/M) in their source country (measured at the time of immigrant arrival to the United States) and the corresponding means for the United States, similarly weighted by the number of immigrants in each arrival period cell. Activity rates are obtained from United Nations data and the sample includes 106 source countries. The activity rate is analogous to the labor force participation rate, including both the employed and the unemployed. We focus on the male–female ratio because we are interested in the gender division of labor and also because expressing the participation rate as a gender ratio implicitly adjusts for issues in measuring participation in the source country, at least to the extent that they affect men and women similarly. (I do not show a corresponding figure for men because the source countries of immigrant men and women tend to be quite similar and hence the male figure would be virtually identical.)
Figure 3 indicates that, in both 1980 and 2000, the average immigrant woman came from a country which, at the time of her arrival in the United States, had lower relative female labor force participation than the United States had at the same time. And, although average home country relative female labor supply at the time of arrival increased between 1980 and 2000, the corresponding US value increased by considerably more. This resulted in a growing gap between US and source country relative female labor force participation—mirroring what we found for immigrant-native differences in labor supply in the United States.
In Blau et al. (2011), we probe the relationship between female relative labor supply in immigrant source countries and the labor supply behavior of immigrant women in the United States in greater detail based on a pooled sample of three US Census years (1980, 1990, and 2000). This enables us to follow immigrant cohorts over time and estimate assimilation effects as in Borjas (1985). We also merge in a cross-country, time series data set of source country characteristic, which we assembled. We control for individual and source country characteristics that might influence labor supply behavior, apart from source country female labor supply. As noted earlier, we focus on adult immigrants and married women. Our source country variables (measured at time of immigrant arrival) include: relative female labor activity rate, completed fertility, GDP per capita, refugee percentage, whether it is an English-speaking or English-official country, gender-specific primary and secondary school enrollment rates, and distance to the United States. Individual controls include (for women and their spouses): age, age squared, dummies for education and race/Hispanic origin, and interactions of the education dummies and the individual’s years since migration. We also control for census region dummies and state dummies for the largest immigrant receiving states (California, New York, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, and Texas). Source country effects are estimated by interactions between years since migration dummies and source country characteristics, including relative female participation.
We find that the source country relative activity rate has a positive, significant effect on the annual hours of immigrant women in each YSM category. Thus, source country female labor supply is strongly positively associated with immigrant women’s labor supply behavior in the United States. Moreover, the effect is roughly stable across YSM categories, suggesting a persistent effect of source country culture on US labor supply behavior that neither erodes nor increases with time in the United States.
Our basic findings are summarized in Fig. 4, which shows simulated assimilation profiles for adult immigrant women relative to natives, controlling for individual characteristics. Specifically, we simulate the profile for adult immigrant women married to adult immigrant men who came to the United States from the same country (or a country with the same relative female activity rate) and at the same time. This is a reasonable way to summarize the findings in that, pooling all Census years, 90.3% of immigrant women married to immigrant men came from the same source country as their husband.Footnote 6 The figure assumes the couple migrates from a country with (i) a high female relative activity rate at the 75th percentile of our sample, or (ii) a low female activity rate at the 25th percentile. This calculation uses individual immigrants, not individual source countries, as the unit of analysis, thereby giving countries sending larger numbers of immigrants more weight in computing the percentiles. The 75th percentile figure is 0.636 and roughly corresponds to the Austrian value for the relative female activity rate for 1996, while the 25th percentile is 0.368 and roughly equals the level for Pakistan in 1994. We assume the sample averages for the cohort arrival dummies and the source country characteristics apart from the female relative activity rate.
As may be seen in the figure, there is a substantial and persistent gap between the annual hours of women from high and low activity rate countries: an unweighted average of 136 h across YSM categories. This corresponds to 14% of immigrant women’s mean hours of 939. Both groups of women work less than comparable natives upon arrival: 279 h less for women coming from a high female activity rate country and 403 h less for those migrating from a low female activity rate country. These are sizable deficits of 26% and 37% relative to the sample average work hours (including natives) of 1093. Work hours for women from both types of countries assimilate dramatically over time relative to comparable natives. Women from high female labor supply countries work roughly the same number of hours as natives after 6–10 years and work at or above the native levels thereafter. Women from low female labor supply countries continue to work less than natives throughout their time in the United States, but after 6–10 years their deficit is only 11–12%. These upward sloping assimilation profiles for women from both high and low female labor supply source countries are not consistent with the family migration model.
The strong and persistent effect of relative female labor supply in immigrant women’s source countries on their labor supply behavior in the United States strongly suggests a role of culture in determining immigrant women’s US labor supply behavior, although, as we have just seen, assimilation is also important. In the following section we push harder on these results to provide stronger evidence that they do indeed reflect the role of culture.
2.2 Additional evidence on culture using census data
It is possible that the findings reported above could reflect the impact of unmeasured source country factors associated with labor supply, rather than culture or some community-level variable associated with gender roles. To rule out this possibility, in Blau et al. (2011), we pursued a number of additional analyses designed to further examine the consistency of our findings with a role for culture.
First, we replicated our analysis for married immigrant women on married men. If indeed our findings for women merely reflected unmeasured source country factors affecting men and women equally, we would expect the results for men to be similar to those for women. Thus, the male analysis might be considered as a falsification test. We found that, in contrast to our findings for women, the activity rate ratio interactions were not significant in the regressions for men. As may be seen in Fig. 5, the profiles for men born in high and low female labor supply countries are virtually identical. This strongly suggests that the impact of source country female relative labor supply is indeed capturing an impact of a community-level characteristic in the source country that specifically affects women.
Second, we investigated the impact of source country female participation of immigrant men on the labor supply behavior of their native-born wives. We found a positive correlation between immigrant husband’s source country female participation and the labor supply of native-born wives; this may be due to immigrant men selecting marital partners with similar preferences to theirs or to a direct impact of the husbands on the labor supply behavior of their wives, e.g., by husbands being more or less helpful with family chores or supporting or opposing their labor force entry or career commitment. In either case, an effect of husbands’ source characteristics on these wives is suggestive of an effect of source country culture on US behavior.Footnote 7
Finally, we distinguished between the effects of a woman’s own source country female labor supply from that of her husband’s source country female labor supply in the cases where the couple migrated from different source countries. This sheds light on the relative importance of wives’ versus husbands’ source country characteristics in influencing wives’ labor supply, when both spouses are foreign born. Our results suggest that women are more sensitive (responsive) to the own source country characteristics than to that of their husband. Specifically, when we looked within couples where both spouses were immigrants, but in which the members of the couple migrated from different countries, we found that women tended to be more responsive to their own source country’s culture (as indexed by source country characteristics) but also that their husbands’ source country also generally affected the women’s labor supply in the expected direction. We view this as consistent with the culture interpretation in that own exposure could be viewed as representing a more intense “treatment” than living with a spouse from a particular cultural background. Similarly, we found that the impact of a wife’s own source country female supply on the labor supply of an immigrant woman married to a native men was larger than the impact of a husband’s source country female supply on the labor supply of a native woman married to an immigrant man. This again suggests that a women’s own exposure has a greater effect on her than her husband’s cultural background.
2.3 Additional evidence on culture from the NIS: individual vs. community-level characteristics and culture vs. social capital
In Blau and Kahn (forthcoming) we use a rich new data set, the New Immigrant Survey (NIS), to explore two further issues raised in interpreting findings like those discussed above as indicating a role of culture. The first issue is a relatively straightforward one: if a women comes from a high female participation country, it is likely that she has more prior work experience (in the source country) than a women from a low female participation country. It is also true that women with prior work experience abroad (regardless of the overall female participation rate) are more likely to also work in the United States. Thus, results like those detailed above could merely reflect the impact of the individual’s own prior experience rather than the impact of a community-level characteristic, like culture. The NIS is relatively unique in providing information on pre-migration work experience, permitting us to address this question. Second, as I discussed at the outset, even if one is fairly confident that a community-level characteristic is involved, it is still not clear that it represents that effect of culture rather than social capital. By examining the effect of source country female labor supply on US immigrant women’s labor supply and wages, we are able to address this question.
The NIS is a nationally-representative survey of adult immigrants who received admission to permanent legal residence in the United States in 2003 (Jasso et al. Forthcoming); respondents were interviewed during 2003 or 2004. While some had just arrived in the United States, others were already here, either under temporary visas or illegally. Thus, the NIS is not representative of all immigrants, but it does represent a random sample of those obtaining permanent legal status in a given year.Footnote 8
In examining the role of pre-migration work experience vs. source country overall female participation, we employ a research design that is conceptually similar to Fernández and Fogli (2006) to examine the impact of culture on the fertility of US-born women from different (self-reported) ethnic backgrounds. Using General Social Survey data from 1977–1987, they control for both the fertility of the respondent’s own parents (i.e., her number of siblings) and the 1950 fertility rate in her country of ancestry. They find that both variables positively affected current fertility and, since the impact of the source country fertility level was still positive, even controlling for the number of siblings, the authors conclude that the results indicate an impact of culture beyond the behavior of one’s own family.
In our case, we find that, as expected, a woman’s pre-migration work experience strongly positively affects labor supply in the United States. We also find that, as in previous work by ourselves and others, women who migrate from countries with relatively high levels of female labor supply work more in the United States. Importantly, most of this effect remains when we further control for each woman’s own work experience prior to migrating. This may be viewed as consistent with an important role of culture or at least of some community-level characteristic in influencing the relationship between source country female labor force participation and immigrant women’s labor supply behavior in the United States.
Also of considerable interest, we find a significantly negative interaction between pre-migration labor supply and source country female labor supply. This means that the impact of source country female labor supply is much stronger for those who did not themselves work before migrating than among those with work experience in their source country, while the impact of pre-migration work experience is larger for those from source countries with low female labor supply than for those from high female labor supply countries. We obtain broadly similar effects analyzing the determinants of hourly earnings among the employed in the United States, although the effects are not always significant. This negative interaction suggests that culture and social capital can substitute for individual job-related experience and human capital in affecting preparedness for work and work orientation in the United States.
While these findings are consistent with a role of source country environment, they could plausibly result either from the effect of culture or social capital. To distinguish between the two, we turn to the distinction discussed earlier that culture represents an impact of source country environment on beliefs or preferences, and social capital represents an impact on productivity or wages. To the extent that source country female participation affects immigrant women’s productivity and wages due to the effect of social capital, it will affect their U.S. labor supply through movements along a given supply curve. To the extent that source country female participation affects immigrant women’s preferences and beliefs due to the effect of culture, it will shift their labor supply function to the right. Based on our estimates, we show that, given plausible values of labor supply elasticities, most (86-95%) of the effect of source country female labor supply on US labor supply operates through a shift in the labor supply function (with the rest due to wages). This suggest that culture rather than social capital is the primary factor accounting for the source country effect.
2.4 The possible role of selective migration
Immigrants represent a group of individuals who have made the decision to relocate to the United States from their country of origin. This raises the possibility that the set of findings reported in this subsection could be due to a pattern of selection of immigration rather than the impact of culture or social capital. We believe this is doubtful for a number of reasons. In both Blau et al. (2011) and Blau and Kahn (forthcoming), we examine the behavior of married women separately, either as a main or a supplementary specification, and obtain similar results as for the full sample of women. Married women are more likely than single women to be “tied movers,” and, to the extent that is true, selection would be less of an issue for them than otherwise (i.e., their husbands would have made the immigration decision). Second, the models in both papers control for distance from the United States, which as Chiswick’s (1978) analysis suggests, may be a proxy for the relative labor market return for immigrants that is not captured by other variables in the model. Third, results in both papers are similar when we control for the source country’s average emigration rate from the United States, thus implicitly addressing the issue of selective return migration.
Finally, it is very unlikely that selection could account for the pattern of results in Blau and Kahn (forthcoming), specifically the negative interaction between pre-migration work experience and source country female labor supply. First, consider the implication of the negative interaction effect that high source country female labor supply has a smaller effect on US labor supply and wages for women who worked prior to migration than for women who did not work before migrating. This result could be due to selection if women workers from low female labor supply countries are positively selected relative to women workers from high female labor supply countries. Such a possibility is consistent with results from previous studies showing a positive cross-country relationship between the gender pay gap and female labor force participation rates (Blau and Kahn 2003 and Olivetti and Petrongolo 2008), although, as Blau and Kahn (2003) argue, this finding could also be due to high female labor supply lowering women’s relative wages through simple supply effects, as long as men and women are imperfect substitutes in production. Nonetheless, if the selection argument is valid, then it may be that the women from traditional (i.e., low female labor supply) source countries who had previous work experience are an especially positively selected group.
However, now consider those women who did not work before migrating. The selection argument outlined above implies that nonparticipants from a high female labor supply country would be more negatively selected than nonparticipants from a low female labor supply country. So selection could not explain why we find an especially large positive effect of source country female labor supply for those who did not work prior to migrating. Thus, while selection could help to explain the negative interaction effect by lowering the source country female labor supply effect for those who worked before migrating, it cannot explain the very large source country female participation effect we obtain for those who did not work prior to migrating. This makes it very unlikely that a reasonable selection story can account for these findings.
In the next section, we consider our evidence on possible cultural impacts on the second generation. This provides additional interesting evidence on the relative role of assimilation versus culture across immigrant generations. However, in considering the selection issue some additional comments are in order. It has sometimes been claimed that the second generation is a more appropriate group in which to study these types of relationships because they are not selected. That is, they represent a group of individuals in the host country who have a similar environment to natives but have been impacted by source country culture. However, second generation outcomes are also impacted by selection, since the second generation consists of children of the possibly self-selected immigrants. That is, their family environments differ from second-generation natives not only due to the impact of immigrant culture but also due to any unmeasured self-selection of their immigrant parents. As we see below, in Blau et al. (2013), we find considerable evidence of intergenerational transmission of immigrants’ education, labor supply, and fertility to their native-born children. This is not to argue that results for the second generation are not of interest, but rather that results for both the first generation of immigrants and their second generation children are relevant and important.