Immigrants' Employment Stability Over the Great Recession and Its Aftermath

Abstract

We examine immigrant men's employment stability during the Great Recession and its aftermath using a longitudinal approach that draws on data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), a nationally representative panel survey of U.S. residents. Discrete-time event-history models are used to estimate male immigrants' relative risk of experiencing an involuntary job loss or underemployment, defined as working less than full-time involuntarily. The analysis also investigates differences in job stability by immigrant documentation status. Undocumented immigrants are identified using a logical allocation method augmented with external information about whether the respondent was successfully matched with administrative data. We find that immigrants are at significantly higher risk of involuntary job loss, and especially of underemployment relative to native-born workers. Undocumented immigrants face a greater risk of adverse job transitions, particularly underemployment in the first part of the recession. When demographic and job characteristics are taken into account, immigrant-native and documented-undocumented differences attenuate but remain in many instances. A comparison of our findings with those from an earlier nonrecessionary period from 2004 to 2006 suggests that immigrants' higher risk of employment instability may be attributed to the recession.

Keywords: Employment stability; Event-history models; Great Recession; Immigrants; Undocumented immigrants.

Fig. 1

Involuntary job loss and underemployment rates for immigrant and native men (three-wave moving average)

Fig. 2

Involuntary job loss and underemployment rates for immigrant men by documentation status (three-wave moving average)