Employment Patterns of Foreign-born Immigrants in the United States: the Role of English Proficiency

This paper studies the effects of English proficiency on employment of U.S. foreign-born immigrants, using data from the 2001 American Community Survey (ACS). It shows that English proficiency plays an important role in immigrants’ employment and its effects on employment patterns across genders are different. Probit regressions show that immigrants with a higher level of English proficiency are more likely to participate in the labor force and find employment. Such likelihood is greater in each category of English proficiency for female immigrants. However, the penalty for being deficient in English in each category is greater in finding employment than in participating in the labor force. Such penalties for female immigrants are much greater than male immigrants at each English proficiency level. There is a complementary relationship between English proficiency and skill levels in terms of employment. High-skilled immigrants benefit more from greater English proficiency than their low-skilled counterparts in finding employment. Such benefits are greater for immigrant women than men at each English proficiency category. However, being proficiency in English is not an important determinant of participation and employment for the low-skilled immigrants. Using Ordered Probit techniques, the results indicate that English proficiency does not seem to be an important contributor for immigrants’ work status improvement, especially for male immigrants’ work status. The Multinomial Logit analysis is applied to examine how English proficiency affects immigrants’ occupational choices. The expected risk of staying in the higher-ranking jobs is higher for those with high English proficiency. In addition, immigrants with more educational attainment are more likely to choose science/academic occupations over managerial/professional/technical occupations. Such a pattern remains for both genders. JEL Classification: J15, J24