Returns to U.S. and Foreign Experience among Immigrant Men: Evidence from IPUMS Microdata

TL;DR

This study investigates how immigrant men’s wages in the U.S. are affected by their foreign and U.S. work experience, showing that U.S. experience significantly boosts wages while foreign experience has limited transferability.

Contribution

It provides new empirical evidence on the differential returns to foreign and U.S. experience among immigrant men using detailed microdata and Mincer-style regressions.

Findings

U.S. experience has large, monotonic returns to wages.

Foreign experience yields smaller, less consistent returns.

Recent migrants from higher-income countries show steeper experience wage profiles.

Abstract

This paper examines wage returns to labor-market experience with a focus on immigrant assimilation and the portability of foreign-acquired human capital. Using U.S. Census and American Community Survey microdata from IPUMS, I study a sample of male, full-time, private-sector workers and estimate Mincer-style wage regressions with flexible experience-group indicators and fixed effects. Descriptive evidence shows that immigrants earn less than comparable non-immigrants within the same year, but that wages rise with accumulated U.S. experience. Regression results indicate strong and increasing associations between wages and total experience in the pooled sample, with smaller experience gradients among immigrants. Decomposing experience into U.S. and foreign components reveals that returns to U.S. experience are large and monotonic, while returns to foreign experience are substantially smaller across most experience bins. Country-specific evidence for recent migrants suggests steeper experience profiles for migrants from higher-income origin countries. Overall, the findings are consistent with imperfect transferability of foreign work experience and highlight the central role of host-country human capital in immigrant wage growth.