Labor force participation, earnings, and occupational distribution of Asian and Hispanic married female immigrants

More than 85% of the immigrants admitted to the US since the 1980's have come from Asian and Latin American countries. Currently Hispanic and Asian immigrants are the largest and the second largest immigrant groups in the U.S. Female immigration has also become an increasingly prominent feature of immigration in the recent decades and they comprise almost half of the immigrant population in the United States. This dissertation primarily focuses on the labor force participation, earnings, and occupational attainment behavior of married immigrant women of Asian and Hispanic origin and how that compares to the natives over the time period 1980-2000. The key contribution of this research is the extensive comparative analysis of the behavioral shifts or similarities in the labor market performance of Asian and Hispanic married female immigrants. The data for this analysis has been taken from the U.S. Census of Population and Housing 5% Integrated Public Use Micro Data Samples for the years 1980, 1990, and 2000.;Heckman's two-step procedure and Probit method are used to analyze the earnings and the labor force participation of married immigrant and native females. Outcomes indicate that education, English ability, and time in U.S. have stronger effects on the earnings of Asian immigrants compared to Hispanic immigrants. The results also show that the participation decision of Asian immigrant women are more influenced by changes in husband's wages compared to Hispanic immigrants and that family factors such as presence of young children and non-working adult relatives are important determinants of the labor force participation decisions of married women.;Multinomial logit models of occupational attainment are estimated to examine the factors that affect the occupational choice of married female immigrants and how that compares to the natives, and Duncan's segregation indices are computed to examine the presence of occupational segregation between immigrant and native married women and whether Hispanic immigrant women are more segregated than Asian immigrant women in the U.S. labor market. The outcomes suggest that Hispanic immigrant women are more segregated than Asian immigrant women in all three years when compared to White non-Hispanic native women. Occupational segregation also exists between Asian immigrant and Asian native women and between Hispanic immigrant and their native counterparts in all three years. The segregation indices in both cases (with own-native and white natives) are bigger in case of Hispanic immigrants than Asian immigrants.