Green Cards and the Location Choices of Immigrants in the United States, 1971-2000

No 29, Working Papers from Department of Economics, College of William and Mary

Abstract: This paper documents where immigrants who enter the U.S. with different types of visas ("green cards") choose to live initially and what determines those location choices. Using population data on immigrants from the Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1971 to 2000, matched to data on state characteristics from the Integrated Public Use Microsamples of the U.S. Census, I estimate conditional logit models with the 48 contiguous U.S. states as the choice set. Like previous researchers, I estimate that immigrants have a higher probability of moving to states where individuals from their region of birth represent a larger share of the state population, with relatives of legal permanent residents responding most to this factor. I also find that, in general, immigrants in all admission categories respond to labor market conditions when choosing where to live, but that these effects were the largest for male employment-based immigrants and, surprisingly, refugees.

Keywords: admission categories; immigrants; settlement patterns; conditional logit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J61 J18 C35 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-geo and nep-ure
Date: Written 2006-05-23
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http://web.wm.edu/economics/wp/cwm_wp29.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Green Cards and the Location Choices of Immigrants in the United States, 1971-2000 (2006)
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