Indians better placed to land skilled jobs in US: study

WASHINGTON: An Indian college graduate coming to the United States is thrice as likely to land a skilled job than a Mexican immigrant of identical age, experience, and education, suggests a new study.

Researchers Aaditya Mattoo, Ileana Cristina Neagu and Çaglar Özden set out to find the empirical basis for such popular perceptions as all taxi drivers in New York are Eastern European scientists or Indian taxi passengers are computer professionals.

They also looked for answers to three related questions: How widespread is unskilled employment among educated immigrants in the United States? Does the incidence differ with the immigrants' country of origin?

Preliminary results of their study using US census data does suggest that skilled employment of immigrants in the United States really differs by country of origin, according to their paper on "Brain Waste? Educated Immigrants in the US Labour Market."

Even after controlling for age, experience, and education level, they find that highly educated immigrants from certain countries are less likely to obtain skilled jobs.

A hypothetical 34-year-old Indian college graduate who arrived in 1994 for one has a 69 percent probability of obtaining a skilled job, while for a Mexican immigrant of identical age, experience, and education the probability is only 24 percent.

Much of this country-level variation can be explained by certain country attributes. Some of these affect the quality of human capital accumulated at home, such as spending on tertiary education and the use of English as a medium of education.

Others lead to a selection effect-variation in the abilities of migrants because they come from different sections of the skill distribution of their home countries- and include GDP per capita, distance to the United States, and the open-ness of US immigration policies to residents of the country.

For example, a large share of immigrants from some countries (such as Mexico) are admitted through family preferences, visa lotteries, and political asylum, while more immigrants from other countries (such as India) have to rely on employment preferences.

The results have implications for policy, says the paper. In many developing countries today, public and private resources are being devoted to providing university and professional education to those who may end up in jobs (domestically and abroad) that make little use of their education.

Gaining a better sense of their destiny should help individuals and their countries improve their allocation of resources for education, it says.

One solution might be to move away from a uniform national educational standard- that is, to set one standard at a level suited for foreign markets and another at a level more appropriate and cost-effective for domestic needs, the paper suggests.

If brain drain is a concern, a country could direct most public funding toward institutions that apply the second standard, while private sources fund the education of potential migrants. At the same time, "export quality" institutions could be liberated from the need to be locally appropriate.  They could even target specific export markets.

The authors' results suggest that individuals educated in some countries are better equipped to overcome barriers, mainly because of greater compatibility of education and professional standards. There are also implications for the design of immigration policies in destination countries.

For example, a simple "points based" system might not be the ideal mechanism for choosing skilled migrants. It might operate more effectively if it gave more points to degrees earned in countries with higher-quality education.

Information on migrants' employment history in their home country or evidence of an offer of skilled employment in the destination country (as in the US H-1B programme) would also be effective in identifying relevant skill levels, the authors suggest.