Conversely, we expect immigration from countries with a large high-skill component to level the social gradient. Footnote 2 Since natives with a disadvantaged family background have a disproportionally high probability of competing in the low-skill segment of the labor market, we expect immigration from countries with a large low-skill component to steepen the social gradient in economic outcomes. Economic theory suggests that natives with qualifications that are complementary to the qualifications of immigrants gain from higher immigration, at least in relative terms, whereas natives with qualifications similar to those of immigrants may lose. The basic idea behind our empirical approach is that economic class background is highly correlated with ultimate skill levels, such that heterogeneity in the impacts of immigration on natives’ economic performance can be traced in its impact on the social gradient. The steeper the social gradient, the lower the economic mobility. Footnote 1 We refer to the relationship between class background and own adult outcomes as the social gradient. The latter is specified in terms of the parents’ earnings rank within a generation, as in Dahl and DeLeire ( 2008), Chetty et al. More specifically, we study how exposure to immigration from different types of source countries affects natives’ relative prime-age employment and earnings outcomes by economic class background.

While there is a large literature on the impacts of immigration on natives’ average labor market outcomes as well as on the outcomes of particular skill groups, this paper is, to our knowledge, the first to examine its impacts on natives’ intergenerational mobility.

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the relationship between immigration and intergenerational economic mobility within a native population.

Economic mobility