For Immediate Release
March 23, 2005
Contact: Cynthia Feliciano, University of California, Irvine, 530-752-1551, felician@uci.edu
U.S. Immigrants More Educated Than Nonimmigrants
(Washington, DC) Immigrants to the United States are, on average, more highly educated than those people who remain in their home countries, according to a study of immigrants from 31 countries published in the most recent issue of the journal, Demography.
The further the sending country was from the United States, the greater the gap between migrants and non-migrants, reports Cynthia Feliciano, a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine and author of the study.
“Immigrant groups facing greater barriers to migration appear to be more highly educated than their home countries’ populations,” Feliciano says.
Immigrants from India and Iran in the 1980s tended to be more educated than 85 percent of the same-age population in their home countries, according to the study. Yet immigrants in the 1980s from Mexico were only 20 percent more educated than the same-age population in their home countries.
By contrast, Puerto Ricans who moved to the U.S. mainland in the 1960s—and, as U.S. citizens, faced no immigration barriers—tended to be less educated than those who remained on the island.
While the regional origins of immigrants to the United States have shifted over the past few decades (from Europe to Latin America and Asia), this shift does not appear to be linked to major changes in educational differences between immigrants and their home country counterparts.
Feliciano found that immigrants from 1960s who came largely from Europe were more educated than 26 percent of the same-age populations they left behind, while immigrants in the 1980s from Latin America and Asia were still more educated than their countries’ non-migrant populations (44 percent).
For her analysis, Feliciano used U.S. census data and UN educational statistics, taking into account both the age of migrants and the size of the immigrant groups.
She found uneven evidence that Mexican immigrants arriving in the 1980s and 1990s were less educated than earlier Mexican immigrants. Instead, Feliciano discovered that the average education level of all Mexicans who immigrated to the United States is higher than the average education level of same-age Mexicans who did not migrate. However, the educational gap between those who immigrated and those who stayed in Mexico was greater among those who migrated in the 1960s and 1970s than it was among those who arrived in the United States in the 1990s.
Feliciano adds that, while scholars agree that immigrants are not a random sample of their home countries populations, they have disagreed over whether immigrants are either the most educated and ambitious citizens of their home countries or the most disadvantaged and desperate.
“These findings suggest that on average, U.S immigrants tend to be more educated than those they leave behind,” Feliciano says.
The full article, “Educational Selectivity in U.S. Immigration: How do Immigrants Compare to Those Left Behind?” is available at www.prb.org/cpipr/demography/Feliciano.pdf. Or call the Center for Public Information on Population Research, 202-939-5409. The Center, a project of the Population Reference Bureau, is funded by the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development.
Demography is the peer-reviewed journal published by the Population Association of America.