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The following HTML text is provided to enhance online readability. Many aspects of typography translate only awkwardly to HTML. Please use the page image as the authoritative form to ensure accuracy. Because the census and household surveys do not distinguish among legal immigrants, illegal immigrants, and nonimmigrants, the three groups are commingled in the tables in this chapter. In consequence, the trends the tables reveal obviously do not represent legal immigrants alone, desirable as that would be. Even though legal immigrants account for most of the foreign-born surveyed, we have no way of knowing whether, for example, the decline in the skills of the foreign-born was due entirely to illegal immigrants—because their education was declining over time or because they accounted for an increasing fraction of the foreign-born in the survey. Nor do the available data shed light on the influence on these trends exerted by the mix of immigrants that is determined by the preference categories under which they were admitted. So we do not know whether changes in immigration policy in favor of, say, the better educated or the more highly skilled would alter these trends. We can gain some insight on these issues from data the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) collects in giving ''green cards" to those newly becoming permanent residents. Among other things, the demographic data include age, sex, and marital status, and the economic data include the occupation reported by the immigrant.14 These data are collected on a monthly basis, so that they are ideal for tracking trends across new immigrant cohorts. Although income is not reported in the INS data, occupation, a key correlate of income, is a measure of an immigrant's economic status. It would be difficult to gauge the overall trend in economic status by directly examining changes in the fraction of immigrants in each of the 25 INS occupational categories. Instead, we use a summary measure created by taking average earnings of U.S. men in each occupation and then assigning such a value to each immigrant based on the occupation they reported—a value we will term "occupational earnings."15 Table 5.9 presents these numbers for six broad occupation categories, along with the distribution of new permanent residents across these categories for three entry cohorts—1977, 1982, and 1994.16 Average occupational earnings appear below the figures giving the occupa-
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