A Study Of Post-1965 Immigration And Its Impact On American Economy

The new immigration has shown some new characteristics since 1960s, especially after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was put into practice. At the same time, the United States was also experiencing an unprecedented economic restructuring, that is, from an industrial economy to a service economy. In this historical context, a fierce debate about immigration broke out again. Many Americans believe that immigrants no longer meet the need of contemporary American economy and thus adversely affected the U.S. economy. By utilizing a lot of original documents, various reports of research institutions, and scholars'writings and papers, this dissertation makes a historical investigation about contemporary immigrants and their economic implication on American economy.This dissertation is composed of the introduction, five chapters of main body and the conclusion. The introduction mainly introduces the reason of choosing such topic, the research objectives and innovations and shortcomings of this dissertation, and then makes an overview of the previous research works by foreign and Chinese scholars.Chapter one reviews the waves of immigration since 1965. It focuses on the historical background, content and impact of the Immigration Act of 1965, and then analyses the different types of new immigrants as well as the motivating force of immigration.Chapter two explores the demographic, educational, occupational and distributional characteristics of immigrants who entered America after 1965. It shows that contemporary immigrants had taken on some new characteristics and trends.Chapter three describes the demand for foreign immigrants of the U.S. economy and explores the process of immigrants'economic assimilation in the U.S. labor market from a perspective of economic restructuring. It indicates that contemporary immigrants meet the need of the U.S. economy as a direct result of economic reconfiguration, and that Immigrants will assimilate into the labor market of U.S. ultimately.Chapter four reviews the debate on immigration's economic impaction in American history, and expounds immigrants'impact on the labor market and welfare system. It concludes that contemporary immigrants exert not a negative but a positive impact on American economy in the long run.Chapter five discusses the contribution that immigrant have made to American economy, and explores the significance of contemporary immigrants to American economy by analyzing the relationship between immigration and labor supply, between the high, low-skilled immigrants and the development of the U.S. economy respectively, combined with some case studies.The section of conclusion makes a brief summary about the economic impact of contemporary immigration on America. It insists that contemporary immigration still have a positive impact on the U.S. economy, and it also shows that contemporary immigration is a great asset rather than a burden to economic development. At the same time, in order to explore the economic impact of migration more easily, this dissertation also proposes to pay attention to several relations followed: (1) the economic and non-economic impact of immigrants; (2) the macroeconomic and microeconomic impact of immigrants; (3) the long-term and short-term economic impact of immigrants; (4) the implicit and explicit economic impact of immigrants.