Rising selectivity of Israeli immigrants to the United States, 1976–2017

The selectivity of immigrants largely depends on economic returns to skills. Since the 1970s the rising income inequality in the US relative to Israel, an indicator of greater returns to skills in the former, implies the intensification of the positive selectivity of Israeli immigrants in the US in recent decades, especially among the highly skilled. To test this hypothesis, we compared the education and income of four successive cohorts of Israeli immigrants relative to two benchmark groups—the Israeli population from which immigrants were drawn and the US population they joined. The results, based on analyzing Israeli Labor Force Surveys and US Census and ACS data from 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2015, support the hypothesis: the gaps in educational levels between successive cohorts of ‘recent’ Israeli-born Jewish immigrants (those who resided in the US for no more than 5 years) and the Israel-born Jewish population from which they were drawn, grew larger over time. Income analyses relative to US benchmark groups, both income ratios and quintile regressions, suggest that the labor market skills of successive cohorts of Israeli immigrants in the US have improved, not only on education, but also on some unobserved traits enhancing income. Moreover, as expected by the theory, the rise in the selectivity of successive cohorts of Israeli immigrants was the greatest among the most skilled immigrants—those located at the 90th percentile of their cohort's income distribution and aspiring to join the very top of income receivers in the US.