Results About Immigration and Natives’ Early- Career Jobs

effects on attendance only, which is not surprising if immigration induces marginal college- goers to stay in school after getting the high school diploma. It is signifi cant that immigration induces local natives to complete postsecondary educational pro- grams, which yield high returns in the labor market. The larger effect on postsecondary attendance than on high school completion im- plies that the effect of immigration is strongest on high school graduates on the margin of attending postsecondary education. These are not all four- year college degree pro- grams. Immigration appears to induce native high school graduates to start and—to a lesser extent—complete license and certifi cate programs, perhaps to differentiate their labor skills from those of immigrants.

VII. Results About Immigration and Natives’ Early- Career Jobs

This section describes another way that native- born residents change their human capital investments in response to low- skilled immigration: augmenting their comparative advantage in communication skills. My fi ndings agree with Peri and Sparber’s 2009: Native- born workers in the midst of less- skilled immigration tend to supply relatively more communication tasks. Table 6 assesses the relationship between early immigration exposure in eighth grade and job characteristics in the early careers of native workers at age 26. The dependent variables in the table are indicators for “a lot” being the response to questions about how much the respondent performs each set of tasks at work. Table 6 includes OLS and 2SLS specifi cations that control for respondents’ sex and raceethnicity and characteristics of the CZ where they live and perform their work tasks in 2000. The coeffi cients on immigration exposure in regressions predicting reading and writing tasks the fi rst two rows of results in Table 6 are uniformly positive. There is not much statistical precision, but the results are consistent with low- skilled immigration inducing natives to invest more in communication skills and use them at work. The next panel of Table 6 is labeled “Computer and communication tasks.” There is not a consistent effect of immigration on computer use but natives originating in CZs with more immigration tend to use word processing, email, and the Internet more fre- quently. Effects are somewhat noisy for the subsample of natives with less- educated parents Columns 5–7 but the coeffi cients are somewhat large and statistically signifi - cant for Internet use. The last row of the table investigates the effect of immigration exposure on manual tasks at work. The effect is negative in all specifi cations and both samples. Overall, the results are consistent with Peri and Sparber’s 2009 hypothesis that natives respond to low- skilled immigration by augmenting communication skills at the expense of manual skills. 24 24. Results were very similar in specifications that add controls for respondents’ completed education. I also investigated whether immigration affected native- born respondents’ job training activities. The NELS:88 asks whether respondents ever participated in a job training program and also whether they got training in order to improve basic communication skills. I regressed indicators for training and communication- specific train- ing on immigration flows in 2SLS specifications analogous to those in Table 6. The coefficients on the eighth grade immigration flow variable were positive but mostly statistically insignificant. Table 6 Immigration and Characteristics of Natives’ Jobs in 2000 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 All Respondents Mother Had High School or Less OLS 2SLS 2SLS Control for Mother’s Education Years Control for Grade 8 School Quality Control for Mother’s Education Years Control for Grade 8 School Quality Communication tasks general Read letters, memos, or reports 0.0308 0.0235 0.0199 0.0321 0.0461 0.0459 0.0633 0.0165 0.0315 0.0311 0.0317 0.0485 0.0484 0.0471 Write letters, memos, or reports 0.0076 0.0224 0.0179 0.0405 0.0623 0.0613 0.0858 0.0144 0.0264 0.0258 0.025 0.0451 0.0449 0.0439 Computer and communication tasks Use a computer 0.0143 0.0263 0.0161 0.0407 –0.0048 –0.0091 0.0255 0.0158 0.0306 0.0276 0.0297 0.0391 0.0383 0.0378 Use word processing 0.0214 0.0777 0.0677 0.0994 0.0593 0.0576 0.0856 0.0198 0.0371 0.035 0.0346 0.0492 0.0491 0.0489 Use email 0.0218 0.0681 0.0576 0.086 0.0783 0.0767 0.1068 0.0186 0.0327 0.0308 0.0311 0.0488 0.0487 0.0482 Use Internet 0.0127 0.0813 0.0713 0.1024 0.1058 0.1042 0.1299 0.0181 0.0359 0.0333 0.034 0.0465 0.0461 0.0475 Manual tasks Measure size or weight of objects –0.0151 –0.0559 –0.0495 –0.0684 –0.0531 –0.0518 –0.0703 0.0151 0.0289 0.0277 0.0286 0.0418 0.0416 0.0431 Notes: p 0.01 p 0.05 p 0.1. Data from the NELS:88. Each row corresponds to a dependent variable. Table only shows the coeffi cient on 1990 immigration from OLS or 2SLS specifi cations instrument for contemporary immigration is a prediction of low- skilled immigration to the CZ using previous immigrant populations. All models also include a constant, indicators for gender and race ethnicity, and 2000 CZ characteristics: percent adult population with a bachelor’s degree, percent population without a high school diploma, and indicators for urbanicity fi ve of them and region three of them. See text for list of school quality controls. Standard errors clustered at eighth grade CZ level. My fi ndings about immigration and job tasks are related to previous research show- ing that manufacturing fi rms in cities experiencing large low- skilled immigration waves are less likely to invest in automation machinery Lewis 2011, and fi rms near higher skill supplies are more likely to adopt personal computers Beaudry, Doms, and Lewis 2010. In light of this previous research about business fi rms, it would appear that workers overall are less likely to use computers in cities with many low- skilled immigrants, but I fi nd that native- born workers experiencing low- skilled immigration waves early in life use computers more frequently at work later on. The increased early- career computer use I observe is probably due more to individual natives’ human capital investment and occupational choices than to local fi rms’ production decisions. Both workers and fi rms are choosing skill and task mixes in production. I have focused on choices of workers to invest in particular tasks, and I believe this is appropriate given that the behavior I observe is in response to immigration waves early in life. However, the effects I estimate are probably also partially due to changes in fi rms’ productive processes.

VIII. Robustness of the Empirical Results