Assortative mating among married new legal immigrants to the United States: Evidence from the new immigrant survey pilot

This article provides a brief summary of the Pilot for the New Immigrant Su rvey (NIS) and presents new information, never before available, on one imp ortant aspect of immigrant behavior - assortative mating. Our intent is to provide a flavor for the kinds of questions that can be studied with this n ew data base and with the larger-sample full New Immigrant Survey by presen ting new information on married couples who are part of immigration flows a nd whose characteristics are importantly shaped by immigration law. We dist inguish between two types of couples, those in which one spouse is a U.S. c itizen sponsor and those in which both spouses are Immigrants. Our findings include the following: First, among married couples formed by a U.S, citiz en sponsoring the immigration of a spouse, husbands and wives have similar levels of schooling, with the U.S. citizen slightly better educated than th e immigrant spouse; however, U.S. citizen husbands and their immigrant wive s have substantially higher schooling than U.S. citizen wives and their imm igrant husbands (on average, two years higher). Second, unlike immigrants f rom other countries, Mexico-born spouses of U.S. citizens differ markedly i n schooling depending on whether they are recently married, suggesting the continuing after-effects of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Third, husband-wife schooling levels are less similar among married couple s in which both spouses are immigrants than among couples involving a U.S. citizen sponsor and an Immigrant spouse, except when the wife is the princi pal in an employment category. These findings suggest that immigration laws importantly shape the characteristics of families and thus the next genera tion - the children of immigrants and immigrant children.