ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the Legalized Population Survey and the Current Population Survey to assess the returns to US experience and find positive returns to US experience for both undocumented migrants and all foreign-born men. It provides a recently released public-use survey of formerly undocumented immigrants along with nationally representative data about the US foreign-born population to address two specific questions related to the wage mobility of undocumented migrants. Supporters of the amnesty program assumed that unlawful status restricted the labor market options of immigrants and that a change in legal status would therefore improve the labor market prospects of undocumented immigrants. Research about the labor market experience of undocumented migrants also advanced during the 1980s, but it did so on a less secure empirical foundation compared to that concerning legal migrants. The 1970s also signaled the end of the wage compression between high school and college-educated workers, as well as a slowdown in wage growth generally.
