THREE ESSAYS ON THE ECONOMIC INTEGRATION OF CARIBBEAN IMMIGRANTS INTO THE US LABOR MARKET: A MIXED METHODS APPROACH
Creators: name: Lacarte, Valerie
Publisher: name: American University
Year: 2023

description: More than four million Caribbean immigrants live in the United States and the great majority comes from Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica and Trinidad &amp; Tobago. Since the 1960s, they have been migrating to the US in search of better economic opportunities. This begs the question, do Caribbean immigrants integrate into the US labor market? Integration on the labor market is defined as becoming more similar to the population. In other words, I am interested in the change in immigrant labor outcomes as they gain more experience in the host country. To answer this, I combine quantitative results from econometric analysis using microdata from the US Census Bureau with qualitative information from my fieldwork with the Caribbean Diaspora living in the US. Overall, I find that integration does happen but that human capital, ethnicity and cultural gender norms are the best predictors of immigrant labor outcomes.After discussing the literature in Chapter 1, I study the earnings gap between Caribbean female immigrants and All Other Women in the US to see after how many years there is a convergence point (Chapter 2). I propose a framework where immigrants are divided into cohorts that arrived in the 1970s, 1980, 1990s and 2000s. Results indicate that it takes Caribbean immigrant women on average 13 years to integrate. At the exception of the Dominican Republic, immigrants who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s all earn significantly more than the reference group. Considering the intersectionality of education, race, ethnicity and culture, I conclude that Anglophones and higher-educated immigrants generally do better. Ethnicity is also a good predictor of outcomes: Black immigrant women integrate faster than Latinas. I also assess variation in quality for successive cohorts and find a definite slowdown in the performance of immigrants who arrived in the decade of the Great Recession. The only exception is for Jamaican women who have maintained a high level of growth in their earnings profile since the 1970s. In contrast, the last wave of Haitian immigrants (2000s) has a clearly negative performance compared to the three previous cohorts.In Chapter 3, I examine the role of cultural gender norms in explaining the gender gap in labor force participation (LFP) in Caribbean immigrant communities. Using the Female labor force participation rate (LFPR) and the Gender Gap in LFPR from the home countries, I find that there is a small but statistically meaningful impact on the probability that Caribbean immigrant women will join the US labor force, less so for men. Generally, the results indicate that coming from a country where female labor force participation is high also encourages women from that country to adopt a similar behavior in the US. Interestingly, there is also a residual effect of the country of ancestry and of cultural gender norms on US born generations of Caribbean descent. In Chapter 4, I present descriptive statistics from surveys and qualitative interviews collected during the fieldwork I conducted between March 2016 and April 2017. The objective is to understand how social capital contributes to the integration patterns found in Chapters 2 and 3. Moreover, interviews with Caribbean immigrants living in New York, Miami and Washington, DC allowed for an in-depth discussion on: 1) the push and pull factors of migration, 2) their experience on the labor market 3) their views on cultural gender norms, and 4) the importance of social capital and cultural assimilation in the US. Overall, the data collected confirms trends from earlier chapters: education, ethnicity and cultural gender norms are relevant predictors of the labor outcomes for Caribbean immigrants.To conclude, in Chapter 5, I present arguments in support of quantitative-qualitative research in economics. By triangulating all the information gathered in previous chapters, I summarize the main conclusions on Caribbean immigrant integration and discuss the complementarity between the econometric analysis and my fieldwork. There are many benefits to conducting fieldwork and collecting qualitative data: it provides deeper explanations on real-world situations to support the quantitative analysis. Many of the findings in this dissertation are consistent with existing literature but by adopting a quantitative-qualitative analytical lens, I produce new estimates on Caribbean immigrants communities, while also analyzing the intersectionality of gender, education, race, ethnicity and culture. While the pace and levels of integration vary, it can be said that Caribbean immigrants, especially women, are successful in integrating the US labor market.