NEST Distinguished Speaker Series - Renee Luthra

Understanding Immigrant Outcomes in in a [Very] Unequal World: Methodological and Substantive Research on Immigrant Selection

How can we understand unexplained variation in the health, education, and labour market outcomes of immigrants and their children? A growing literature posits that one reason why standard models may fail to explain national origin differences is because they ignore immigrant selectivity - the degree to which immigrants differ from non-migrants in their sending countries. This immigrant selectivity hypothesis has both methodological and substantive implications. First, high levels of global inequality in health, education and income means that standard measures of socioeconomic positioning are insufficient for heterogeneous populations that include immigrants from all over the world: the meaning of these measures varies for the foreign born of different origins. Second, by failing to account for this measurement invariance, we may falsely attribute advantages and disadvantages observed between immigrants of different origins to cultural background or receiving country experiences. 

In this talk, I cover recent efforts by myself and colleagues to address the challenge of studying immigrant selectivity. First, I describe our methodological work on this topic, including the development of measures that allow us to better capture selection in health, socioeconomic status, and values. Second, I show how, and under which conditions, accounting for immigrant selection enables us to better understand inequalities in the education, labour market, and health outcomes of the foreign born and their children. 

Zoom Option: https://westernuniversity.zoom.us/j/96441705949