Wages of UK immigrant men across generations: Who catches up?

Abstract

This article examines UK immigrant-native wage differentials for men across major first- and second-generation immigrant groups with the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) pooling cross-sections over the years 2009-19. I find that first-generation immigrants with UK human capital experience less of a wage disadvantage than their immigrant counterparts with foreign language proficiency, qualifications, and work experience. Conditional on the heterogeneity in these productivity characteristics of first-generation immigrants, I observe no intergenerational economic progress across the two generations relative to UK natives. Using a conditional decomposition shows that UK work experience and not the source country of study for the qualification is a key factor in reducing first-generation, immigrant-native wage differentials in the UK.