Economic assimilation of Asia-Pacific immigrants in the United States considering various pathways to legal immigration

Protap Mukherjee, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)
Lopamudra Ray Saraswati, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)

Our main objective is to find out the level of assimilation of the migrants from the Asia-Pacific region in the United States in terms of income. A vast comparison has been done among the migrants from India, China and the other countries of Asia-Pacific region. For the present study, we make use of a data-source “New Immigrant Survey”. It is a multi-cohort progressive-retrospective panel study of new legal immigrants to the United States. The information has been drawn from Round-I of NIS’s fiscal year 2003 cohort, which includes completed interviews with 8,573 adult respondents. Among them 771 are from India, 469 are from China and 594 are from other East Asian, South Asian and the Pacific countries. Results from the baseline model show that acquisition of human capital significantly raises the rate of remuneration among all the immigrants.the apparent effect of education and nationality changed significantly, resulting in a change in the assimilation level mostly for China.