. "5 Immigration's Effects on Jobs and Wages: Empirical Evidence." The New Americans: Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 1997.
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TABLE 5.3 Average Hourly Wages and Earnings of Foreign-Born and Native Women in 1970, 1980, and 1990, Civilian Employed, Ages 25-64, 1995 Dollars
Notes: Recent arrivals are defined as foreign-born women who arrived in the 10 years preceding the census year, and earlier arrivals include all other foreign-born women. Hourly wages are computed by dividing annual earnings from wages and by weeks worked and average hours per week. The sample is women aged 25-64 years who worked at some point in the preceding year, were not self-employed, did not reside in group quarters, and were not in the armed forces at the time of the census.
a "Other America" includes Central America, the Caribbean, and South America.
Similar patterns appear in comparing the hourly wages and annual earnings of native and foreign-born women (Table 5.3). Recent arrivals have lower wages and earnings than native women; this gap has widened over time, whereas earlier arrivals fare well relative to natives throughout the period. The same diversity in economic outcomes exists across sending countries. However, the wage gap between recent arrivals and others is generally smaller for women than for men, as is the variation in wages across region of origin.
One gender difference of note involves the changing standard (native-born wages) to which immigrants' wages are being compared over time. For men, the wages of natives were quite flat over the past few decades and, consequently, the growing gap implies an absolute decline in the real wages and earnings of recent immigrants. In contrast, the real wages of native-born women have been rising, so that the widening of the gap among women is consistent with flat or rising wages of immigrants.5
5
The other noticeable gender difference is that, for women, the widening in the gap between recent immigrants and natives was much more dramatic for earnings than for wages. For men, the change in
