| Popis: |
Using an immigrant assimilation framework, this dissertation builds upon Chiswick’s (1977) human capital model, and attempts to develop a model of occupational mobility of immigrants that takes into consideration the effect of country/context specific conditions. This study tests the fitness of Chiswick’s (1977) against a proposed final model and poses questions regarding the determinants of changes in occupational status of college-educated immigrants from their country of origin to subsequent jobs in the U.S. Using Multinomial Logistic Regression and data from the 2003 New Immigrant Survey, this study found that the final model including structural predictors proved to enhance the prediction of changes in job quality over the model with only human capital factors. The following results are uncovered in the analysis: First, a large portion of foreign-educated immigrants experience a sharp decline in occupational status when they first move to the U.S. followed by a rise in job quality with time spent in the country, however, most are not able to recover all the status they lost initially. Overall, college educated immigrants had varying outcomes in terms of occupational mobility. These outcomes depended on immigrants’ gender, origin, English proficiency, time spent in the United States, place of education and work experience, type of immigration visa, receiving a job offer prior to migration, and occupational licensing requirements. |
