The earnings of Mexican immigrants in the United States

This paper documents the trends in the earnings of Mexican immigrants during the 1970-1990 period. The empirical evidence indicates that there has been a decline in the relative wage of successive Mexican immigrant waves in the past three decades and that little wage convergence occurs between the typical Mexican immigrant and the typical native worker. The data also suggest that the increasing importance of Mexican immigration is partly responsible for the deterioration in relative skills observed in the aggregate immigrant population, but that there has also been a decline in relative skills even among non-Mexican immigrants.