Channeling and Wages Among New US Immigrants from Mexico, India, and the Philippines

Abstract

National — and local — conversations about immigration are often centered on immigrants’ integration into the US society. One factor that shapes immigrants’ integration is their pre-migration work experience, skills, and training and a series of studies have used “channeling” as a concept to identify immigrants who have worked in the same occupation and/or industry in the destination labor market as they had in the origin labor market, prior to migration. Using the New Immigrant Survey (NIS) and a simultaneous equation model (SiEM) approach, this article expands on this research by exploring the impact of channeling on wages for Asian Indians, Filipino/as, and Mexicans with lawful permanent resident (LPR) status. Contrary to prior findings on the effects of channeling within specific industries, we find that channeling is associated with lower, not higher, immigrants’ wages. The findings are robust to different definitions of channeling, as the negative effects of channeling hold within industrial sectors and occupational groups. Moreover, the results indicate that channeling is not exclusive to the Mexico–US migration stream, but instead may be a feature of various US-bound immigration streams, including those from India and the Philippines.