For young male immigrants, naturalization facilitates assimilation into the U.S. labor market. Following naturalization, immigrants gain access to public‐sector, white‐collar, and union jobs, and wage growth accelerates—consistent with removal of employment barriers. The faster wage growth of immigrants who naturalize might alternatively result from greater human capital investment prior to naturalization, stemming from a long‐term commitment to U.S. labor markets, but there is no evidence that wage growth accelerates or the distribution of jobs improves until citizenship is attained. Finally, the gains from naturalization are greater for immigrants from less‐developed countries and persist when we control for unobserved productivity.

Life cycle employment of minority labor migrants who entered Norway in the early 1970s diverges from that of natives. Immigrant employment was nearly complete during early years but declined to 50% by the year 2000 (compared to 87% for a native comparison group). We find that immigrant employment is particularly sensitive to the business cycle and that economic downturns of the 1980s and 1990s accelerated their labor market exit. We trace part of the decline to migrants being overrepresented in shrinking industries. But we also identify welfare disincentives that contribute to poor life cycle employment performance of immigrants with many dependent family members.

This paper analyzes the return migration of foreign-born persons in the United States.We argue that return migration may have been planned as part of an optimal life cycle residential location sequence.Return migration also occurs because immigrants based their initial migration decision on erroneous information about opportunities in the United States.The study uses the 1980 Census and administrative data from the immigration and Naturalization Service.Immigrants tend to return to wealthy countries which are not too far from the United States.Moreover, return migration accentuates the type of selection characterizing the immigrant population left in the United States.

We provide evidence on wage profiles of immigrants using Current Population Survey data from 1979 to 2003, taking into account that changes in labor market conditions impact natives and immigrants differently. High rates of immigrant wage assimilation, in general, and relatively high wages of immigrant cohorts that arrived during the 1990s, in particular, can to a large extent be explained by a negative trend in unemployment in the data. Relating immigrant and native period effects to local labor market unemployment, we find that wage assimilation among lesser-educated immigrants is negligible. For high-school– and college-educated male immigrants, rates of wage assimilation during early years in the United States are procyclical, suggesting that rising unemployment slows accumulation of U.S.-specific human capital.

We evaluate the impact on youth crime of a welfare reform that tightened activation requirements for social assistance clients. The evaluation strategy exploits administrative individual data in combination with geographically differentiated implementation of the reform. We find that the reform reduced crime among teenage boys from economically disadvantaged families. Stronger reform effects on weekday versus weekend crime, reduced school dropout, and favorable long-run outcomes in terms of crime and educational attainment point to both incapacitation and human capital accumulation as key mechanisms. Despite lowered social assistance take-up, we uncover no indication that loss of income support pushed youth into crime.