ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a broad profile of the highly skilled in the United States, defined as workers in professional occupations at the end of the 1990s. It looks at all professional workers, who fall under various policy regimes. The chapter also provides a brief overview of immigration admission policy, focusing on the comparison of different groups of foreignborn admitted to the United States. It discusses problems with definition and the identification of different ways used in research and immigration policies to operationalize the category 'highly skilled.' The chapter describes the highly skilled/professional immigrant labor force in terms of their demographic and socio-economic characteristics using data from the 2000 US Census. It compares immigrants to natives on their human capital characteristics, their geographical and occupational distribution, and their labor market outcomes. The chapter examines educational qualifications within those occupations in order to understand how comparatively "skilled" native and immigrant professionals are.
